Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: What if there were a third browser?

Author:paul haeberli
Posted:11/30/1998; 9:36:10 PM
Topic:What if there were a third browser?
Msg #:616 (In response to 560)
Prev/Next:615 / 617

Here are a few ideas for an alternative browser that i wrote up a year ago out of frustration with IE and Nav.

1. Allow the leading (the space between lines of text) to be adjusted to make the text more readable. The most important thing for readability is not the font size but rather the space between the lines.

2. Eliminate all flashing as pages are drawn.

3. Implement non-flashing smooth scrolling. Does anyone remember using ascii terminals with smooth scrolling? can be very nice.

4. It would be super cool to extend the applet tag to support a default color or image to be displayed while the applet loads.

Maybe this should be an option to the embed tag if it isn't aleady.

5. If the new page has all the HTML and images already in cache, it would be super sweet to render the image off screen and copy to the screen. That way the new page would instantly change with minimal distration. Then people could make content that looks and works alot more like interactive CDROMs.

6. It might be cool to add a "preload" tag, although this could be abused.

This tag would load the specified files into the cache while the person is reading the current page. Webtv uses the tag to do this.

7. How about making the browser so that you can put all the controls at the top in a "slide away" mode where they slide of the top of the screen when you more the mouse away. That way you could read the document content with no distraction or waste of screen space, but still have the convenence of the tools.... use time in the the user interface.

8. The scroll bar on the right could also be put into a slide away mode. so it is only drawn when you move the cursor over there.

9. Add support for a "gamma" tag. This would insure that color images and RGB colors at least looked pertty similar cross platform. The gamma tag could appear here:

or per image as well:

Gamma would apply to RGB colors also. An even better thing would be to implement support for quantitative color specs with white point, chromaticities, etc.

10. What's happening with displaying equations? Are you implementing the HTML spec (I think there is one).

11. As much as possible make documents appear pixel identical across different platforms.

12. implement all the user interface of the browser using HTML or XML.

13. Allow the browser windoe to be split into multiple columns and display HTML documents in multi column mode. REading test is alot easier with shorter lines.

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