Basically we should both maximize the potential for creative developers to create revolutionary tools, and also protect users who know next to nothing about problems with the web.

More vim-split like capabilities - native multiple tabs within a tab would be great imo

More programming languages (not just confined to Javascript)

More hackable (like emacs level hackable maybe)

The current plugins system is good, but maybe there are more creative ways to push the envelope.

Better native ABI support, maybe.. suppose I wanted to collaborate my Ableton jam session into someone else's Firefox tab, or I wanted to pair program in Sublime Text with somebody else via a Firefox plugin, etc

So kind of like how Netflix Party improves Netflix, but instead with any app

Maybe some good built in (opt in) tools that allow people who have a problem with surfing the net for too long every day. E.g. browsing screen time, etc. Of course private data, not to be shared.

Maybe a browser fingerprint-intercepting layer that just returns useless data to browser fingerprinting tools, unless the user would like to be fingerprinted. I really like Firefox's Facebook container plugin, which helps protect me from Facebook across the web.

I'm actively exploring/implementing this, which has shaped my thoughts on the topic.

1. I'd have the browser recommend apps to install to open otherwise unsupported MIMEtypes & URI schemes. I think most desktops support this now (certainly FreeDesktop.Org-compatible Linux & BSD ones do via "AppStream"), it'll free webdevs from compatibility worries, & allow low-cohesian features like videoconferencing & (like brimstedt & osrec discussed) apps to be entirely independant codepaths.

2. For the sake of markettability & accessability (unlikely bedfellows) I like to target unusual human interface devices, e.g. voice, "smart" TVs. It should be a goal to work well absolutely anywhere!

3. I was kind of surprised to find that the next biggest simplification after dropping JavaScript is to move forms out-of-line from the webpage into their own codepaths. This allows me to better reuse OS code whilst simplifying hypertext event handling, avoid webdevs complaining that native widgets clash with their designs, & design a better UX for more devices.

4. There seems to be plenty of precedence suggesting it'd be a good idea to allow links to partially update a webpage, or open modal dialogs/popovers. hey.com is a prominant example.

5. The DOM needs to be replaced, it's an overengineered OO monster straight out of the 90's that can be largely replaced with about 10 lines of code in any language. It's expensive for the browser to construct, for JavaScript to optimize away, and for webdevs to deal with directly.

6. I've got almost no complaint against CSS (I found it easy enough to implement), but sometimes author styles actively make websites worse. So support for user & alternate styles should be emphasized to the user, and websites should still look good if they don't provide CSS.

7. Drop support for CSS `position:`, there's better alternatives now & it does more visual harm than good.

8. I prefer XHTML over HTML as it's easier to parse, but there's a better compromise to be reached between the two camps than the one WHATWG prescribes: handle self-closing tags and close any intermediate tags between the current one & the explicitly closed ones. This routine seems to work well enough on the modern Web, even if it'd break some CSS selectors.

That covers the main points, I'm curious to hear other thoughts?

>7. Drop support for CSS `position:`, there's better alternatives now & it does more visual harm than good

Tell me an alternative to flexbox scrolling with "position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0".

I do agree "position: sticky" and "position: fixed" are harmful though.

I'm not clear what you're describing with "flexbox scrolling"?

My reasoning is that I want to prevent elements from overlapping and obscuring important information. CSS is generally designed to avoid that, which is what the "CSS is awesome" memes like to illustrate.

>I'm not clear what you're describing with "flexbox scrolling"?

"position: absolute" can be used to disrupt the two-way size propogation. Without it you either get shrinked content on y, flexbox wrapping problem on x, scroll appearing on a wrong element in some cases (or cropping for "overflow: hidden"), or you have to set width and height of the block with scroll using css "calc()" — all these solutions are ugly.

>My reasoning is that I want to prevent elements from overlapping and obscuring important information

The most simple example of overlapping elements is a background/border. You can look around this page and find a lot of overlapping graphical elements — it's not the problem, but overlapping text (and other content) is.

"CSS is awesome" example formally has no overlapping DOM elements, no "position" attributes. It's just a block with "border" style and "width" set to some fixed amount. Often this problem happens without border on the block and remains invisible, unless two such blocks are really close together and the text begins to overlap. Still no "position" involved though.

Remove the JS runtime, replace it with a WASM runtime (assuming a future version of WASM with native, non JS DOM support) and relegate Javascript to a language module that just happens to ship with the browser for legacy reasons, along with other popular languages like Rust and Lua.

I would also re-introduce the type attribute to the HTML script tag and extend the tag to allow downloading WASM language runtimes as necessary. If the browser already has it cached, it would use the cached version like any other asset.

The end goal is for all software to be universally accessible and executable from a URL or some similar identifier. It's possible there may need to be another protocol for streaming applications rather than HTTP, I don't know.

This is a vaguely sketched out pie in the sky idea i've had for a while. I have no idea if it's even feasible, but I'd like to see it happen.

While Tim Berners-Lee was indeed mostly concerned with (scientific) documents, with form support HTML 2 already introduced application-like features. HyperCard, one of HTML's spiritual precursors also was very much about applications.

That said, I'd like one feature of the original web browser to be much more prominent (or in fact to be available at all): In-place editing and instant publication of changes, alongside with version control.

That'd of course require infrastructure for those publications to run on. So, it'd not just be a different browser UX but an entirely different way of publishing on the web.

Interesting concept. I imagine web pages which behave like a shared Google doc.

XHTML, WebAssembly, and CSS.

If you want to use an interpreted language you can compile the interpreter to WebAssembly (https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide and https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython are examples).

Every page is written in markdown (without html), extended to support forms and embed videos and images. You can just look at content, click links, send form data. Websites can only provide content, the style is specified by the user. Clicking a button won't run untrusted code on your machine.

Graph centric. Everything is a graph, I'd prefer to start off with semantic web endpoints and pluggable modules. Sorta like nestable pinboard, prioritizing the simplest mime types and deprioritizing anything which too much code unless it's providing specific functionality.

I'd have web widgets. No reason every website needs to take up the full window

So the ability to tile windows into a single screen, without them sharing the same context? Perhaps, like a bunch of iframes containing their own "web page", but with the control over how the frames are arranged given to the user?

Yeah similar to that. E.g. I could have a window that shows weather from one website, twitter feed, youtube, whatsapp/fb messenger. Ideally they could interact (with user control).

This is what the new portals api is about

Is that this https://wicg.github.io/portals/?

Get rid of HTML and CSS. Have everything done more programatically like React.

Disallow foreign code execution in the browser, allow spawn of non-native code only in a separate process. No JavaScript, no Java, etc.

Ok, so you would allow foreign code execution, but only in a separate process?

If not JavaScript, then what would you prefer to write the foreign code in? Should it be some sort of interpreted script or do you feel all foreign code should be compiled?

Would you allow access to the file system, if permitted by the user? What about other native APIs, like networking, Bluetooth etc?

I agree with this sentiment, but I'd take it a step further.

I personally think, the fact that we're shoehorning so much app-like stuff into the web highlights the need for a good web-based app delivery mechanism. If we provide a solid app delivery mechanism, then people can create their own document publishing apps/mechanisms using that.

I know this might lead to fragmentation of document formats, but hopefully there'll be one clear winner in terms of popularity and ubiquity (similar to WhatsApp or PDFs).

Well, PDFs are yet another issue. It's preformatted documents made specifically for a certain size paper.

This is not optimal for documents to be read on screen/mobile devices since they handle zooming, changing text sizes etc poorly.

In a way I can agree with you that application delivery would allow document distribution as well, but I think the benefits of a unified standard for this that focuses on content rather than presentation is a key feature of the web that we should not loose.

I've been thinking about this a lot. The browser is starting to resemble an operating system. I already have an operating system. Instead of building this Russian nesting doll, maybe we need something new.

A better programming language than Javascript, and a better CSS. CSS is not intuitive IMO.

- robotic process automation

- built-in collaboration

- offline storage, data cache

- internet-archive's client, permanent web

Support for micropayments.

That could be as amazing an improvement as experiencing television shows without commercials was for the first time.

Please could you elaborate on how this would work and improve things?

I'm pretty sure today's web is going at least two different directions that can't be easily merged together. On one side we have textual and basic graphical data that is supposed to be controlled by user, like resizing, scaling, copying, bookmarking, drag and drop, and so on. On the other side we have interactive applications supposed to work strictly as-designed with complex handling of internal state, like Adobe Flash or HyperCard did. When you merge those completely together you get a frankenstein, when you kinda have the content controllability until you don't, when the content is displayed as designed if you are lucky enough.

I would like to remind you the whole reason for creation of Angular/React/Vue/Polymer/etc — that is because you have this overbloated DOM which is slow despite being implemented in fast low-level compiled languages. The main reason is complexity of calculation of inline elements (text and images with wrapping) and two-way propagation of size (parent to child and child to parent). At the same time the whole idea of CSS as a customizable style description (similar to LaTex/MS Office/OpenOffice styles) is completely forgotten while becoming inseparable from the rest of the content e.g. visibility styles, inability to show the content in different sizes, etc. And now we need workarounds like Webpack and HTTP/2 for putting together separate files that are not so separate by their functions. Because, in fact, a simple textual HTML is separate, its CSS is separate, but dynamic application within this page is a single entity composed of html+styles+js+images — similar to adobe flash swf blob.

I've been writing native GUI apps for like seven years, but now I write web SPA, and the more I write them, the more I feel like today's HTML is not a good platform for true GUI application, because within DOM simple GUI things have to be implemented as complex entities. Yes, we got a flexbox which makes positioning much simplier than float blocks or scripted positioning. However, we also got "display: grid" and "column-width" which also implement flexbox-like behavior, but slightly different. In the end it doesn't matter how many layout mechanism we are going to have — it will never be enough.

Recently we got HTML5 canvas, including WebGL, but we got no good language to write the program for this canvas. Actually, WebGL is the closest to the double-world model of web browser I'm trying to suggest, because WebGL uses a separate high-performance shader language to describe the WebGL-canvas logic which is uncoupled from the main web page's logic. We can also render from a webworker into WebGL canvas, and chromium supports OffscreenCanvas capable of webworker rendering. However, both 2D canvas and WebGL lack one important thing — two-way composability i.e. include html page into canvas. Just like native GUI apps struggle with including native elements into internal browser, canvas struggles with including web browser into 2D or WebGL context.

Actually, Microsoft once solved this problem by implementing support of custom elements in the IE browser, thus bringing a two-way composability. However, due to windows-only nature of the solution it had not achieved wide acceptance. Some cross-platform execution environment is required for success, like JVM or CLR — WebAssembly being the most relevant today, but the composability problem has to be solved. Until then, the developers would still prefer to keep the composability by avoiding HTML5 <canvas> and clinging on the old DOM as long as they can.

And by the way, speaking about cross-platform runtime. JVM, CLR, optimized JS, WebAssembly, and non-native-architecture VM have similar performance, so it's really not the fundamental execution speed that killed Java applets, but a failed GUI model "every pixel is drawn by JVM bytecode". WPF, UWP, JavaFX tried to fix the issue, until "everything is web" came.

Now about a second small idea I have and I've been struggling with for many years of web surfing. Bookmarks, history, and tabs are not separate things. The gap between them is closing but closing very slowly. We are getting web services that live between pages, we are getting frequently visited pages as a kind of bookmarks, we are getting cheap tabs that are loaded only when user switches to them, but nobody is brave enough to erase the separation and create a single visited-tab-bookmark entity. Today's computational resources clearly allow us to save some amount of data about every visit without forcing the user to be a bookmark keeper, especially when the user has no convenient tools for managing current tabs he's working with, and as for me I work with 50-300 tabs daily, so it's really a pain to manage them with this "ten tabs on the screen"-oriented tool modern browsers have. I know tree-like tabs exist, but usually they have their own issues. I'd prefer to open the tabs in a full-screen view, preferably with preview. Some people in the older days would save onto HDD every page they visit — they had a struggle sorting all the crap they've got.

Thank you for this incredibly detailed answer. I too am an SPA guy, specifically because I like the clean separation between data and presentation they allow, which HTML simply doesn't.

This was exactly the kind of answer I was looking for when I asked my question, so thanks again!

>I too am an SPA guy, specifically because I like the clean separation between data and presentation they allow, which HTML simply doesn't

HTML was never intended to separate data and presentation. That's what PHP and other server-side languages (ColdFusion, Perl, etc) were used for, because HTML specifically is a presentation. Moreover, DOM, as HTML representation, is also a presentation. Considering high availability of network bandwidth, I'd say there's no more need to squeeze data into client-server channel, that's where server-side rendering comes into play with thin client just doing presentation thing.

I disagree. I think HTML was originally a structured document format. And CSS was another layer on top of HTML, specifically for presentation.

Today, we see a mish-mash of HTML + CSS (+JS) being used for presentation, since neither HTML, nor CSS can successfully solve every problem on their own. They often also need to rely on JS.

Regarding bandwidth and SSR, I disagree also. I think we should do things more efficiently where possible, not less. In my current SaaS product, if we were doing SSR instead of client side rendering, our hosting costs would be through the roof right now. As it stands, we have one large-ish download at the start, followed by very small JSON payloads thereafter. Plus, using service workers, it can work offline, which is not really possible with SSR.

First of all, I just want to empasize there exist kinda three layers: data -> presentation -> decoration. HTML still acting as a presentation, but in SPA it also acts as a decoration together with CSS. Secondly, we need to find what the data is. Because often the data is on the server database, while everything else is transmitting and caching the original data.

>In my current SaaS product, if we were doing SSR instead of client side rendering, our hosting costs would be through the roof right now

It's good you mentioned your product instead of generalizing implicitly. Because SSR in some cases allows you to prerender pages and host them statically, thus significantly reducing server CPU and RAM load, and also making page loading time very fast.

>Plus, using service workers, it can work offline, which is not really possible with SSR

Similar scenario is possible with SSR, allowing for completely offline operation. SSR implementations usually require scripts to be run on the client side, and also allow for defining explicitly server-side-only and client-side-only scripts, including full transition into kind of SPA for specific pages, as well as a full SSR prerendering with dead-static content on both server and client. And gzip can help to reduce the bandwidth required.

javascript

Use standards, that's enough. And avoid that a random Corp create the next unaccessible thing and force it down to everybody and avoid support for not standardized / proprietary technologies

So, you feel the web should be more simplified? Or is it more that you want to keep the complexity, but also want good standards to be followed across all browser vendors (e.g. banish CSS prefixes and Chrome-only JS APIs etc)?

What about the wide range of web apps the new APIs enable? Do you think they should be catered for somehow?

Having standards does not imply no more new APIs. But creating them only for one browser doesn't bring progress on the web but rather lead to monopoly and at the end inaccessibility.

Consider that with chrome (and chromium based browser) we're close to the situation we had back in the days with IE.

So I'd say open standard definition for web API should come first, later each browser will have their own release process to include them inside but at least behavior and aspect are defined upfront and this will avoid lots of issue

As of today for example and I'm using both Firefox and Chrome daily. You'd be surprised on how many website have been tested only in Chrome and some stuff do not work in Firefox at all

>Consider that with chrome (and chromium based browser) we're close to the situation we had back in the days with IE. >So I'd say open standard definition for web API should come first, later each browser will have their own release process to include them inside but at least behavior and aspect are defined upfront and this will avoid lots of issue

Just a sheer complexity of the layers being deposited during the current and the previous century makes it impossible for a single person to understand all the possible interactions. So today's situation with chromium-based browsers differ from IE in that the latter deliberately went against existing standards while creating many non-standard features.

In the last years google set a course for putting more and more features into browser so no other browser can catch up quickly enough. And despite the fact google actually tries to be standard-complaint and to create standards for their new feature, but only a large corporation is able to implement those features e.g. Mozilla.