what else could web browsers do by default? - ☞ ∙ Life on the Web

(note: when i say Firefox i mean LibreWolf but am assuming the stuff i say applies to more or less all Firefox forks)

A: Another thing Firefox used to support is setting a custom address as your home page or new tab page. It still does this, but only for the home page, and it can't be a local file so it has to be a live page on a server somewhere. I guess i could set it to a hidden page on my site that redirects to a local file (so it's only downloading a small page every time instead of the full sized page), but even still that would only work for the first tab that opens every time i open the browser. NetSurf allows local files, but apparently also doesn't do this for new tabs.

A: I was going to mention per-site custom CSS, but apparently Firefox does already support it. You just have to find a particular directory from an obscure menu, enable something in about:config, and then you can write your CSS. With browser-specific at-rules. Even if a lot of people who would write their own CSS are technical enough and good enough with computers to figure this out, that still leaves out people who could otherwise just download a stylesheet for this and install it from a menu, if Mozilla cared to make that possible.

A: I think Firefox' tab containers are great, except they're disabled by default (fine) and can only be enabled by installing an extension (‽‽‽). Ideally they'd just be enablable without an extension. Basically they make separate folders on your computer for cookies and other storage stuff. The intended use is staying signed into multiple different accounts on sites in different tab containers, which sounds useful for anyone who has more than one account for anything.

A: The one thing i see stopping Firefox from being a WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor is that when you use developer tools to edit a page and then save that page, it saves it without your changes, as the page was before you started. Being able to use the element inspector to pick out one cell from a large table visually in context, for example, would be just peachy. While they're at it, an editing mode in the developer tools would be more work to implement but also useful. So that would also include things like clicking and dragging to move and resize elements, or dragging and dropping other tabs or items from your history/bookmarks to insert hyperlinks. Maybe other browsers already do this stuff. I don't know, i've never tested if i can use Vivaldi or Lynx this way.

B: Building on this, what if there were elements that only worked on a custom home page (to hopefully avoid more browser wars)? Something like a search bar for each search engine you use. Things that would improve the experience for anyone who can write a little HTML for their own home page.

B: Punicode is not super well known, i think. It's a way to encode non-ASCII scripts in domain names that's more confusing than Unicode. Firefox does not render it properly by default, as a safety measure against sites impersonating other sites (google.com vs gοοgle.com with Greek omicrons for Os). I think it should render Punicode by default, but add an icon to the address bar to tell you it's doing this (with an explanation on hover) when you're on a site that uses Punicode. And then having an option to disable Punicode altogether is fine.

B: It's nice that Firefox can read PDFs. It would be nicer if it could also read EPUB files, which sounds easy since those are already made of XML. I've yet to find an ereader program for Linux besides Calibre, so if i want to read an ebook i can either unzip it and open the files in a browser, or move it to my ereader. It's a format with surprisingly little support.

B: Custom keyboard shortcuts for buttons added by extensions. I don't know how hard this would be to implement, but it sure would be useful. I use Temporary Containers to create and delete tab containers, for nearly all my tabs. Being able to set that to something instead of having to move my hand to my mouse, click a button, and then move it back to the keyboard to start typing an address.

C: Support for protocols besides HTTP(S) would be nice. Gemini and Gopher are the big ones, but there's also Spartan, NEX, Finger, maybe more i don't know about. The only browser i know that does this is Alhena, which is primarily a Gemini client and only does HTTPS on the side.

C: KDE Konqueror is the only browser i know that doubles as a file manager. I don't use it as one because my computer's other file manager, Dolphin, works fine, but that seems like something a browser could do that wouldn't be hard to implement. Firefox already lets you view directories if you're looking at local folders or sites that aren't set up to block that.

C: Opening a random item from a bookmark folder. I don't think this would be very useful, but it could be fun for people like me who hoard bookmarks (instead of hoarding open tabs) and are bored sometimes. There's an extension for this, but it came up so rarely that i don't use it anymore.

C: Internet suites sound great. With how many email providers already have web-based clients, having an email (and RSS) client built into your browser would just be a convenience. I know SeaMonkey does this (and is still updating), but modern browser requirements are too much for that small team to keep up with. If it had better support for CSS i might try to use it as my primary browser, but it doesn't and i'm getting off topic.