Today, our computers are always on, never restarted,
always connected.
This is a bad thing, not a good thing.
My personal machines and devices are not high-availability servers, and don't need to be powered on all the time. I close my browser windows, and power off my machines frequently, and deliberately. I generally don't gain very much from the practice of leaving the room for an hour, with my machine powered on.
I'd like to dissent from this echo chamber of constantly advocating promiscuous systems, that tend to do things for us without asking us first, and promote biased decisions in favor of permissiveness. I pretty much hate that you can't remove the battery from an iPhone.
That said, there was an time when client/server computing delivered a lot of the kind of functionality, via a fragmented industry of proprietary "enterprise" applications, that has, lately, been re-cast as the broad ecosystem of "mobile apps" (which are essentially the same thing, only smaller and portable). Also, since HTTP is a stateless protocol, "rich web applications" (aka: HTML5+ & JS), have been able to fill in a lot of gaps in web browser behavior with asynchronous requests. I tend to think that JavaScript will become the open version of the once proprietary non-interoperable model of native binaries and client/server computing.
For you, perhaps. I use my open browser tabs as a current "state" of my mind. My todo list, if you will. You might use a different method for keeping track of what you have to do. Maybe you have a good memory.
At least the browser tabs come back after the browser quits. My main reason I never reboot is my terminal tabs. Each one is cd-ed to a project directory and each has command line history and scrollback history that are potentially important reminders of where I am on that particular project. I go for weeks without rebooting (even in the face of OS updates) because I don't want to lose my terminal tabs.
Powering off machines is a detail. They should go into low power mode and switch themselves off when they are not being used. Why should I have to remember to do it? They are machines, they're built to remember things like that. As long as they save their state, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, a lot of this is about personal preferences, and preserving them across time and space. It's not always a bad thing. There's always a trade-off between convenience, automation, predictability and security.
Another good point spolu brings up:
The chrome/ subdirectory of the chromium project (all
that makes up the Google Chrome experience: tabs, settings,
sync, omnibox) is made up of 5,343 C++ implementation files,
adding up to 1,449,451 lines of C++ code (as of 2013/09/11).
It's hardly tractable by one person, and hints to the fact
that it's probably impossible for a one guy to modify it
alone to come up with a profoundly different experience.
This detail doesn't get a lot of discussion, but I think it's sometimes an essential fallacy of the very premise of the open source concept, that having the ability to audit source code, doesn't necessarily make it a realistic option.
Lots of modern contraptions are simply too complex for any individual to ever claim a hope of gaining an honest understanding of their inner workings, nevermind an unskilled layman. At least, not without living like a cleric, cloistered away in the library of some convent or monastery for most of one's life. Sometimes I feel that the real hazard is that we gloss over the idea that we're trying to exert control over a massive arrangement of billions of transistors, however small they may be. If we were confronted with an elaborate array of ordinary light switches, and told to conquer the same tasks, I think it'd be easier to realize the true scale of some of the things we fiddle with on an everyday basis.
It's more than just the ability to audit, it's the ability to fix specific problems so you can focus on your business requirements. This happened to me recently -- I was using Apache in a rather unusual reverse proxy configuration and was unable to suppress (using the usual directives) certain headers which were causing problems upstream. I could have spent a long time researching other solutions or coming up with clean workarounds but at the end of the day it was quick and effective to simply edit mod_proxy_http.c and fix the problem directly. Now that the service is up again, I have time to come up with better solutions if I desire.
When our closed systems misbehave, my only option is to shrug and ask if we have a support contract.
> an essential fallacy of the very premise of the open source concept, that having the ability to audit source code, doesn't necessarily make it a realistic option
I don't think the studious hermit going over every line of open source code was how it was supposed to work either though.
It's more just that you have lots of groups exercising the code and looking into various portions of the code - if every group decides "Yep, the portion we use/looked at is solid", then you gain some confidence that the code does what it's supposed to. The more groups using/perusing the code, the more confidence you gain.
there really is no trade off between "convenience, automation, predictability and security."
there's nothing magic about switching your machine off to increase security. It's just as vulnerable when you're using it, more so in fact. I'm not sure how shutting your machine off adds any predictability either. If you want to achieve the same thing just turn off wifi.
For mac laptop users we get the best of both worlds, always state preserving, but essentially "off" when not in use. Sadly neither windows nor linux have ever got "sleep" right.
I do the same thing with terminal tabs, is there a program out there that remembers the working directory and history of the terminal tabs that are open, then after closing reinstates it all when opened? This doesn't seem like it would be too hard to do.
Kind of like a tabbed browser that remembers history and open pages, but for terminals.
(1) screen will do a lot of that. But if the system has been restarted, live processes in the terminals will no longer exist.
(2) You have the option of a suspend-to-disk, which can 'wake' you back to the right place.
(3) You could use an OS running in a VM, and suspend that. This is arguably the cleanest solution right now.
(4) You could get really in to process checkpoint/restore stuff in the kernel which seems to be constantly under development to facilitate live process migrations across machines in data centers.
Actually though, in all cases you will lose your network connections, which might be critical to the processes as well. Perhaps re-evaluate your workflow.
I use iTerm on Mac and it has a setting you can enable that remembers tabs and even opens new tabs to the current directory of your current tab. When I restart my computer, the tabs and command history for each are preserved, but the output display is lost.
Well, it's not powered all the time, your computer probably go to sleep while you're not in the room for a period of time, but the state of the computer is kept in memory. So it definitely feels like it never stopped. Having that state kept around is hardly a bad thing IMO.
I believe that classification would be more suited for a *BSD user or someone concerned with integrating the Plan 9 userspace into their workstation.
Linux has a pretty low entry point nowadays. Plenty of people I know surf the web, use Skype and check their email like any other user but do it on Ubuntu.
There are some WMs which either emulate look-and-feel of the Windows environment, or let you map hotkeys, that this isn't too much of a hurdle. My preference happens to be WindowMaker, which allows extensive hotkey mappings.
Have I done something weird to my Mac? 10.7.5 Lion here, when I press the power button it comes up unchecked by default.
"Edit: since 10.7.4, the "Reopen windows when logging back in" checkbox has stayed unchecked if you uncheck it once, so the hacks below are not needed anymore."
I think there are some stateless SSH / terminal options you can use.
screen, certainly (I rarely ssh to a host without starting screen), though tmux is what the cool kids are using these days.
I regularly suspend my laptop. Almost as good as leaving it powered. The main hassle is if you've got multiple SSH sessions to the same host, and you need to sort out which is what.
> I'd like to dissent from this echo chamber of constantly advocating promiscuous systems, that tend to do things for us without asking us first, and promote biased decisions in favor of permissiveness.
This is a decent argument (partially) in favor of the ideas discussed in the OP. I'd love to see a world where browsers are akin to libraries, and hackers roll their own.
> I pretty much hate that you can't remove the battery from an iPhone.
This is why I don't own one. I encourage you to vote with your wallet.
You explain why it's not necessary for you, but you don't explain why you think it's a bad thing. Why is it bad that our computers are always on, never restarted, always connected?
As long as your monitors power off and you're not leaving the system doing much CPU work, modern computers don't use a lot of power when quiescent. Sure, they use more than being turned off, but they're not exactly IR hotspots.
For comparison, as much as your washing machine, dishwasher and all your 10 (cfl) ceiling lights together (from http://www.carbonfootprint.com/energyconsumption.html). Or as much as a low efficiency fridge-freezer.
Multiply by 2 if you run air conditioning. Multiply by number of employees for an office. Etc.
Your numbers seem off. 7-year-old desktops with monitors off rate 50-70 watts. More recent desktops in that link are 30-40 watts, so you're looking at numbers a little bit more than 20% smaller.
I'm also not sure about your office, but in my office the lights are on for much more than the four hours per day in your other link.
And similarly, we're talking about when I'm not using my computer for work, so it's not 440 kWh/year (24x50x365). Given I work about 9 hours a day, the portion of a year that I'm not at my workstation (including weekends) is about 250 full days - so the number is actually more like 240 kWh/year (24x40x250) for leaving it on overnight.
Hello. I've customized my browser (Firefox) quite a lot.
Just interested to hear other people's options on it.
It's based around the idea of maximizing vertical screen space while keeping everything I use handy. (I have a widescreen monitor) most websites don't even use all the horizontal space where vertical space is really important.
Only tangentially relevant to the post but I'm interested to hear what other "techie" people think and how others customize there browser. Also the screenshots of the ExoBrowser is kind of interesting as it mirrors this fairly unusual horizontal oriented layout that I've seen many programmers using.
Screenshot:
https://imageshack.us/a/img855/7486/u9j0.png
My addons list:
https://imageshack.us/a/img819/2726/7gdd.png
The browser holds up pretty well even with the 258 tabs I currently have open. (Although it does use 4GB of ram.) It'd be really nice if someone could code an addon to unload tabs from memory if they're not used for a while.
Anyhow, what are people's thoughts on this?
Thank you for this. The memory is down to 1GB now.
I think I checked a while ago but none supported newer Firefox versions but now it works just great. :)
Vertical tabs was one feature of firefox that kept me using it almost indefinitely. Firefox would do all sorts of goofy things like freeze up entirely while playing Netflix or Hulu. I got to this point where I would use Chrome for doing anything media related like that and Firefox for "everything else". I found myself enjoying Chrome more and more, but the lack of vertical tabs kept me in Firefox.
Eventually though, I had enough of Firefox's shenanigans and now I just suffer through horizontal tabs. Now my usage pattern has changed and I'm constantly having to weed out tabs so I can figure out where I am.
Of course it's embedded in Firefox OS, but Firefox OS is really just Firefox built with special options, so in theory with some work you could expose that BrowserAPI to desktop. And there's actually a viable path whereby you could create a new browser as an open web app (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Apps) with the permissions to use the BrowserAPI and it could be installed as a normal application, including on desktop. Of course that's a bunch of steps and unimplemented bits, but you'll be following a path that "upstream" is actually committed to. So committed they actually made just what you describe ;) (Even though the design of the browser is pretty conventional – but it's the concept of a browser-built-on-html that you are exploring at this point.)
I'm glad things are moving in the right direction. Yet there are a few things missing in the current BrowserApi to really enable new browsing experiences IMO, such as network delegates, acces to cookies and local storage.
Still really awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Are you involved with this?
The BrowserAPI is certainly not complete, but it's something. Some stuff might be harder than others. Intercepting networking is not very easy in Firefox – you can spy on networking, but the code isn't setup with hooks to change it up. And I don't know if something like localStorage would be exposed via the BrowserAPI – it's more low-level than that sort of thing. But if you are thinking about moving that kind of state around there's another Mozilla project called PiCL: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/PiCL – it's working more in the guts of Firefox, but like much of Firefox it's in Javascript (compared to Chrome which is more biased towards C++). But it's not nearly as friendly an environment as content Javascript :( Anyway, that's more where localStorage manipulation and transportation is going to be happening in Firefox.
I think this is very cool. A thin browser with all the chrome parts done in javascript could be good for a number of things. The author touches on browser UI prototyping, but I also see how this could be a lightweight XULRunner competitor.
Packaging up "native" apps with node on the backend and html on the frontend could be a very nice thing for cross-platform app writers.
I'd kill for a simple, embeddable open-source browser with C bindings and proper JS/HTML5/CSS3 support (something like Awesomium, but free and with less jank).
Berkelium came close, but seems to have been abandoned.
Such a project would be of immeasurable use to all the folks who have cool native code that needs a nice-looking GUI.
spyder, I digged it quite a lot and felt like the API you get access to using JS are quite high level and does not give you that much leeway to build fundamentally new experiences...
If you have a little spare time, the following things might help it seem not-dead:
* Add a tiny blog post so the date on the main page isn't May 2012.
* Add a "low-hanging fruit/wishlist/todo" to the http://www.uzbl.org/contribute.php page - I see "how do I get involved in XYZ" questions here and on Reddit all the time.
I don't want to be a let downer but it seems like a tremendous effort for not so much. How REALLY different this will be than the current add-ons/extensions?
Maybe I didn't get the concept of 'Stacked Navigation' but looks like a mix of current pages and history displayed vertical instead of horizontal.
And synchronized sessions I am pretty sure that if you search for it on chrome store you find more than one plugin for it.
Agreed with your points, you can find extensions that serve 90% of what could be stacked navigation in Chrome + you have extensions which lets you synchronize your sessions in chrome.
The main thing that motivates me, is the ability to log into an unknown computer an retrieve my session from the network. I've put a lot of thoughts into building an extension that would let me do that, and figured out that it was not possible for now. That where the motivation comes from, build a scriptable platform that would let you alter the behaviour of your browser much more freely than with extensions.
@hesselink still not built, but what I'd love to do is to be able to log through my phone into computers running the browser in my vicinity.
Once logged in, you retrieve your session(s) which encapsulte the open tabs (chrome/firefox/safari) but also your cookie store (they'll probably do it soon enough)
The major difference I see, is the ability to easily and transparently log into any machine running the browser.
It looks like the point of this effort is not 'stacked navigation,' or any other concept currently there. The point is to experiment with many different concepts and to find something new.
I think this is a very cool idea.. it means people can hack and do experiments with the browser platform.. something the big guys (the one that owns the browsers and the commites) dont like much we do
On the other side i think it will find a ferocious competition from the chrome apps.. since there are a web_contents or webview one could embed via extensions..
so the big question is, how this idea could distinguish itself enough so it can be competitive with chrome extensions? (since chrome dominate all over?)
anyway we need badly that some people stand against some standards and try to do some things better.. it must come from people outside the players.. cause its there innovation really lies..
the corporate world took control of all the standards, and freeze it out.. so they can come up with dubious platforms on the other side, or influence standards to comply with a strategy that is good for them..
so this open world we all like, are pretty much in danger
because "they" are controlling it
i think also there is a catch with javascript.. and by allow it to do more, there are a bad effect on the first good thing on html.. that is HTML markup!
i mean.. less html and more js code means we are endind with a common language and grammar of communication between computers and people .. with js taking more and more part of it.. we wont be able to understand whats suppose to print in the screen anymore.. it gets more and more obscure, and less standard.. and this in the end will just help the bad guys with their closed platforms..
anyway.. this is all things we should think.. theres a lot in stake here.. we need to protect and save what is good..
and we need to be able to distinguish what it is, so we dont end aiding the things we are against to in the first place
I really like this concept, very much. It seems like a "Dock" for web pages. I find myself opening up the same page twice in a tab all the time throughout the day, since my default move once I can't easily find a tab is to open up a new one. After a few hours I have about 40 tabs open, only a few of which I have clicked away from and then re-used, and I find myself tempted to close all of them rather than curate them.
We should never open two tab for the same web page, and your solution here seems to prevent that. Nice job - I hope to see it gain some steam.
Along with other suggestions, Firefox gives you a suggestion to go to your previously open tab when you start entering the URL. I use this a lot when trying to find tabs.
The exobrowser might be awesome for experimenting with browser ideas, but if it takes off it's a gaping security nightmare since now javascript lives outside the sandbox.
As I understand it, the exobrowser allows you to load a local html/js layout that can embed webcontent objects that behave like top-level frames and the javascript outside the box can presumably see (at minimum) window and url change events inside the webcontents. (Hence, security nightmare.)
I'm amazed so many people can leave their computers on for days. I do audio production and also run a lot of utilities on Mac OS 10.6 and 10.8. Both of my computers regularly enter states of non functioning that require reboots (sometimes more than one) to fix. At least once a day.
What do you think will be the performance implications of this? My gut feeling is that straight up C is going to be more performant than JavaScript of any variety, when both are done correctly.
Also, do you have any ideas yet about how plugins (e.g. flash, webex, etc) would be handled?
- I still have many issues with the state of the first experiment, UI responsiveness is not one of them. The rest of the performance are native... so it seems it's just fine. HTML/JS served and communicating through web-sockets locally is pretty fast!
- For the plugins, luckily, the Content API includes the Pepper Plugin API... so you can have flash (and the rest of the native plugins that work on chrome) out of the box for almost free.
Many ways that people use browser tabs are a coping mechanism for an inadequate window manager. My window manager is extremely fast, and provides tags, which are at a minimum like workspaces or virtual desktops, but are really much more than that.
With a fresh session, tag 1 is selected. This is the default configuration; the tags can really be named anything and can even be dynamic. Any window that is created is then labeled with the tag that is selected. I can deselect tag tag 1 and select tag 2. All the windows that are tagged with 1 are removed from the viewport and any windows with tag 2 appear. Any new windows are then created with tag 2. I can switch back and forth between tag 1 and tag 2 very rapidly. This is the traditional workspace mode of working
I can select multiple tags, doing so will show all the windows that have any of the tags I've selected. Furthermore, if I create a new window, it will be labeled with both tags, and switching (which is really just selecting one tag to the exclusion of others) to either tag 1 or tag 2 will show that window. In addition to labeling new windows with whatever tags are currently selected, I can modify an existing window's tags very easily. This system lets me group my windows in a very flexible and easy-to-understand way. All of the shortcuts for interacting with my window manager begin with the "windows" key. That is beautiful, because windows<=>window-manager makes sense, and because applications almost never have their own shortcuts that involve that key, so there are no collisions.
On top of the tagging feature, it has some excelent layout modes that automatically place windows how I want them, and those layouts are attached to tags - when I select a tag, it changes the layout to the last layout I applied on that tag. For news browsing and general reading, the layout is always that each window uses the full viewport. When it's like this, my window manager looks exactly like a fullscreen browser with tabs. On the tag that I typically do coding activities with, I use a layout that splits the screen vertically into two sections: a primary and supplimentary section. Depending on what I'm doing, the primary window will either have the code I'm working on, a view of the output from the code I'm working on; the supplimentary will have a repl, a shell in the directory where my project is, and a documentation browser. Switching between all these windows is also completely keyboard driven, so I can code away, move to the reference to look something up, then get back to my editor very rapidly.
Anyway, that's just some of what I have available in my window manager. I almost never use tabs in my terminal, browser, or anything else because the window manager is much more powerful.
It's far more than inadequate WMs. I've got a WM that works very well for my other tasks. For managing my Web content it simply doesn't play.
I've found two tools that help me to degrees: Calibre (an eBook reader / content manager), and Readability.
What they offer that a browser doesn't is both content management (bookmarks are a very weak pass at this) and queue management (the ability to organize a list of articles I'm reading). Tags are another solid plus.
The footprint of both is also vastly smaller than my browser.
I've also been finding myself increasingly dissatisfied with mainstream browser offerings. The basic problem: the browser is increasingly becoming a generalized applications platform (Chrome especially). The main benefit of this is in providing rapid application deployments and cloud hosting. The disadvantages are that the browser itself is heavier than lead. Why do I need 1-3 GB of browser to do what 100MB or so worth of mutt can accomplish?
Much (most) of my browser usage, though, is based on _content_. And browser tools for surfacing, curating, cataloging, managing, and tracking content are simply awful. In the past year I've discovered both Readability and Calibre. Both are vastly better oriented at the task of actually reading and managing content, though they've got their warts. Readability lacks a desktop app (it runs as a webpage), though the Android client is nice. Calibre lacks Web integration, but has much better content management features than even Readability.
Both are oriented more around reading-optimized formats (ePub and PDF for Calibre) than Web browsers are. And their footprints are vastly lower.
The first link below details more gripes and suggestions, briefly:
Readability features (applies also to ePubs):
It renders web pages viewable.
It manages my reading list.
The reading list is available across different browsers and devices
You do not need to have every tab loaded, rendered, in active memory and sucking CPU at the same time.
Give priority to the foreground tab.
Completely redesign bookmarks with thought given to workflow.
Improve responsiveness.
The existing Firefox "add page" modal dialog is fucking annoying as hell
Provide a duplicate entry search and reconcilliation.
Emphasize tags. They're present but poorly presented.
Emphasize bookmarks for navigation.
Improve annotation capabilities, including cross-referencing.
Provide a decentralized sharing mechanism.
Include a few lines of context from the page.
DESIGN THE BOOKMARKS LIST TO WORK AS WORKFLOWS.
Provide the ability to download the bookmarks source in offline-readable format.
Provide search / navigation / management of active tabs.
New browser for desktop is not a good idea in my opinion. You have to make it for mobile to make sense. Oh wait, there are many projects that are already doing that
My personal machines and devices are not high-availability servers, and don't need to be powered on all the time. I close my browser windows, and power off my machines frequently, and deliberately. I generally don't gain very much from the practice of leaving the room for an hour, with my machine powered on.
I'd like to dissent from this echo chamber of constantly advocating promiscuous systems, that tend to do things for us without asking us first, and promote biased decisions in favor of permissiveness. I pretty much hate that you can't remove the battery from an iPhone.
That said, there was an time when client/server computing delivered a lot of the kind of functionality, via a fragmented industry of proprietary "enterprise" applications, that has, lately, been re-cast as the broad ecosystem of "mobile apps" (which are essentially the same thing, only smaller and portable). Also, since HTTP is a stateless protocol, "rich web applications" (aka: HTML5+ & JS), have been able to fill in a lot of gaps in web browser behavior with asynchronous requests. I tend to think that JavaScript will become the open version of the once proprietary non-interoperable model of native binaries and client/server computing.