Re: [dev][surf] Next schedule?

From: pancake <pancake_AT_youterm.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:23:46 +0200

Few random things I want to comment in the thread..

What about a tree of tabs? This way you can keep topics and
hirearchically relations visually easy.

One of the best features of firefox3 is the undo-tab :) And it's also
nice to keep the browsing
history on every tab (this is, when you open a web in a new window, you
can track the source of
it.. but as I see.. this can be represented in a single tree (that can
be done in the filesystem).

I tend to have zillions of tabs in my desktop box (because is something
I never shutdown),
 but in my laptop I use surf (and sometimes firefox with less than 4-5
tabs).

I think that the massive use of tabs is because the web contains too
much information and I use
it as many others said, as a temporal stack of information that needs to
be processed.

Another nice feature of ff3 is the autocompletion bar that autocomplets
with the titles of the
webs, not only the url, This is a nice feature (but would be better if
it could also index the
contents of the web) to replace google and bookmarks.

The only reason to use bookmarks (as I understand) is to put few direct
links to make
browsing experience of my mother easier. But I think that none of us use
them because they
are harder (and boring) to manage than the use you do of them. Neural
networks are here
to help...so the bookmarks should be generated automatically. And yeah,
pron banned from
the indexing ;)

Another feature I miss in surf is the possibility to browse without the
use of the mouse. There
are plugins for firefox, which try to do the same as konqueror did in
the past, that was adding
a numeric value after each link. I think this can actually be done with
user.js by parsing the DOM
and adding a javascripting keybinding at every <a> tag.

We can probably collect user.js scripts like this (or the one for
banning spam) in the web page of
surf, as 'extensions' or so. Dunno if javascript supports 'include'.

In a suckless way i can imagine a keybinding (like bookmarking) to surf
that stores the webpage
in disk inside a directory under ~/.surf, this way it is possible to
grep for keywords inside the
directory and retrieve the original url or load the statically stored
web (which is really interesting
for offline sessions, and that's something I hate about tabbed approach
because eats so much
resources innecesarily).

I dont really have any final idea in my head, but I think this thread
can help to identify the problems
in current browsing usages and create a tool to manage
tabs/bookmarks/history in a simpler and
better way.

--pancake

Jessta wrote:
> I tend to use tabs as a stack of temporary bookmarks, I navigate to a
> page and open all the links I want to see on to tabs, closed that
> pages and move through all the tabs, it pretty much makes the back
> button redundant.
>
> Mostly I'm just putting things on the stack or pulling them off, I
> don't tend to go back to a tab I've previously been at, so it's always
> bugged me that firefox thinks it needs to load all my tabs and keep
> them in memory constantly.
>
> I have this idea of a stack based browser, where instead of opening a
> new window(or tab) it just adds the link to a stack(maybe using
> vertical dmenu), that I can pull stuff off.
>
> - Jesse
>
> On 17/09/2009, Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 2009/9/17 Antoni Grzymala <antoni_AT_chopin.edu.pl>:
>>
>>> Anselm R Garbe dixit (2009-09-16, 14:48):
>>>
>>>
>>>>> I wonder if there is a schedule for the next developpment on surf. Is
>>>>> it planned to add multi-tab support? If no, I guess I'll take a look
>>>>> at the code and submit an ugly-but-functional patch.
>>>>>
>>>> I think tab support in firefox/IE/chrome/Safari/Opera is just a ugly
>>>> workaround due to the limitations present in floating desktop
>>>> environments. Tab support is the WMs job -> use dwm and it'll work
>>>> like a charm to use tags and layouts in conjunction with surf.
>>>>
>>> I usually have about 70 tabs open in Opera (and often lots more). Since
>>> Operas tab manager is *specialized* for this number of fullscreen
>>> windows it works well. I can easyli navigate those using single-letter
>>> keystrokes.
>>>
>> I'm not sure that having 70 tabs open is sensible and really I can't
>> imagine that this could be any useful.
>> This must clearly be a problem with the browser's UI if it encourages
>> you to keep all tabs open. I mean there should be much better ways to
>> manage web sites you look at. I never found the bookmarking in
>> browsers convenient which could be also the reason why others like you
>> end up with plenty open tabs.
>>
>>
>>> This isn't possible or sensible in a wm which is designed for a somewhat
>>> different purpose and with rather different number of clients in mind.
>>>
>> dwm is designed with arbitrary amounts of clients in mind. The default
>> tiled layout isn't admittedly, it serves a different purpose. But the
>> internals of the tagging/viewing concept are and it comes down to a
>> good layout management in the end. I can't see a single reason why dwm
>> shouldn't be able to manage your browser tabs.
>>
>>
>>> Stop this wm lunacy. dwm is just as limited for that purpose as is your
>>> next non-tiling WIMP-based window manager. Opera's built-in wm is a good
>>> workaround for that problem, I don't see in what way it is ugly (and it
>>> works already).
>>>
>> I'm always open for improvements if there is a good reason and cause
>> identified. But first please really think carefully what's causing
>> this mis-use of 70 tabs in Opera for you. That's surely related to an
>> issue that has nothing to do with the WM or with the web rendering
>> engine...
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Anselm
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
Received on Thu Sep 17 2009 - 11:23:46 UTC

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