Ask HN: Are modern browsers just not that good?

6 points by dvanwag 7 years ago | 4 comments

Kept finding myself going back to this post:news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17638477 and was wondering what happened to all the mainstream browsers? Is there any out there that are user friendly and customizable without being locked down?

I mean Edge is getting to the point where it's somewhat useful, IE is...well, IE, Firefox is now a clone of Chrome, and Chrome is at a point where I'm afraid to have more than one or two open tabs because of the amount of system resources it consumes. What happened?

LeoPanthera 7 years ago |

I find myself looking for a "just a browser" browser, like I remember from the late 1990s.

Firefox calls home, and has Firefox Sync and Pocket integrated.

Edge calls home, and is tied into your Microsoft account. (Along with the rest of Windows 10.)

Who knows what Chrome is sending back to Google, probably way more than I fear.

Safari is close, but only exists on macOS and integrates with iCloud.

The closest I've found far is "GNOME Web" (which used to be called Epiphany). It's Just A Browser! But as far as I know, being a GTK application, it doesn't function well outside of the GNOME desktop.

The world needs a new, open source, cross-platform, Just A Browser.

PaulHoule 7 years ago |

The web is dead. I think anything interesting in user interfaces is going to come from some other direction.

For instance I wrote something that downloads weather radar ahead of time so I can see something better than what is on TV weather as compared to the many weather radar web sites which practice a form of "responsive design" which means it looks fubar on all browsers all of the time.

I am getting sick of seeing Firefox put up as many boxes as it possibly can for me to X out advertising every cause in the world except the idea that hiring one more intern in San Francisco is doing the devil's work.

ankurdhama 7 years ago |

The world took web (the whole idea of documents linked to each other) and used all their "creativity" to make this some sort of "application platform" (which is never was designed to be).

PaulHoule 7 years ago | |

Kinda like the way they built Lotus Notes on top of a document database?