Top 5 features that browsers need
The following 5 things would really help developers to create better web applications.
1. Standard Libraries
We should take the core of Dojo or something similar and embed it in all browsers so it doesn't have to be downloaded on every web page. It should not be as big as full Dojo, and it should be stable.
2. Server Push
Comet is too hard. Reverse Ajax in DWR is one of the trickiest bits of code I've ever written. It should not be so hard.
3. Better Widgets
Menus, trees, sortable tables, tabs, draggable divs. The What-WG is working on some of them, but by no means all.
4. Vector Graphics
Microsoft? Have you got beyond "we're thinking about it?". Opera, Firefox and Safari/KHTML all have Canvas and SVG either in a full release or in CVS.
5. Local Storage
You can use cookies, or flash, or get an nice API from Dojo Storage, but we should have it in a native browser feature.
What did I miss?
Re: Top 5 features that browsers need
<h2>3. Better Widgets</h2> I completely agree with this one most of all. If we can have standard html elements like text boxes, radio buttons, etc. Why haven't more advanced structures like trees and the like been invented. This is an area where browser technology needs to catch up.
<h2>4. Vector Graphics</h2> I'd rather see the browser handle intelligent page scaling. For instance, if you are running at a very high resolution, I'd like to configure the browser to uniformly scale attributes in .CSS files, html element's width values, image pixels, etc. It seems like this would be easy to do. I use ImageZoom, a plugin for Firefox to automaticly scale images, but I'd like to see the style elements automamticly scale as well.
<h2>5. Local Storage</h2>
I don't see a need for this feature.
What did I miss?
1) Print integration! I'd like to have the browser have some type of "hooks" into it that a web application can use to print directly to a printer rather than having "Printable Views" or some type of embedded active X object hacked together to do this.
Re: Top 5 features that browsers need
Print Integration: I guess you can't do what you want with a special print CSS? And is your suggestion secure? Can an attacker con me into printing something I don't want to print?
Re: Top 5 features that browsers need
- Not needed. What we need is a standard way to provide SHA-1 hashes so browsers can know that they already downloaded it from a different site. Problem solved.
- Agreed.
- Not really needed (see my answer to point 1), but a few nice ones could come in handy.
- VML sort of gets the job done, but I agree that I'd like to see Canvas and SVG natively supported in IE. (I'd also like to see not just browsers but windowing systems in general support smarter automatic scaling for fine resolution.)
- See the WHATWG Storage recommendation.
- Print support in CSS might be enough, but I'm not fully experienced in this area.
- My own addition: Streaming media. We obviously need it, and having to depend on Flash or Quicktime or whatever is really a big pain. Get some patent-free (or equivalent) thing like Ogg into all browsers and life would get so much easier.
Re: Top 5 features that browsers need
Also widgets like trees are really, really hard to get totally right.
What-wg has lots on a data table, which seems like overkill to me, but nothing on trees and tabs. I'd guess that trees where more commonly implemented in JS than data tables.