The seduction of Browser Hacking

I’ve just spent another day in the Flock office. It’s like an addiction – browser coding is the opium of hacker drugs. Why?

• It’s really hard (cross-platform, mixed languages, and inherent complexity).
• Millions of people will use the result (at least, until they turn off Netscape).
• It’s not that hard to innovate.

Now, I imagine there are legions of Mozilla folks arguing with me on that last point, but if you look at this essay on browser featuresets, we’re essentially still living in the 90s – most of what most people need to do, most of the time, is still difficult, and poorly exposed.

Think I’m being harsh? Okay, try signing up for a new service with your browser – say, Firefox. Did you get this great dialog?

Why would you do this to someone??

How bout this for an approach instead:

– We have just saved your password. <Undo that> <Undo, and Don’t ever do that>

In a browser bar – non-interruptive, and it’s already done the best thing. (Of course, this is predicated on having a “public” mode in the browser, or a “logged in” mode – wait, didn’t we have that in NS6?)

Anyway, I (of course) have been dreaming of the super browser since just before we started work on Netscape 8 (which was originally going to be NS 10 – ask me about that sometime). The one that *I* would want to use. The one that I quit my job at Mercurial to join Flock and build.

If I was business savvy, I would build the ElderBrowser. I know – I coined the term, at Gnomedex ’07. (And damn their shitty network connection, too – it died in the middle of my attempts to register the domain, and GoDaddy scooped it from me.) Talk about an unserved market. But honestly – it’s not really the browser that I want to build.

What does that browser look like? I’ve got 20 pages of notes. Perhaps I’ll put them up here. Would you use it?