This. While I don’t make my own extensions or bookmarklets, I chose to develop for the web because of its openness and how it’s not owned by a singular entity. I do not want to be at the mercy of Apple or Google with their distribution channels.

With Google’s manifest v3 debacle, it’s clear we need to fight continuously and ruthlessly to keep the web for the people.

We shouldn't be fighting. We're powerless. The anti-trust regulators should be taking up this fight.

Google should be broken into several companies.

A breakup would be good for shareholders. Google would be worth more as separate companies, because currently they're giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in value for free.

They'd also have to be more nimble, which would increase fitness instead of being an overfed goldfish in a tiny pond.

A breakup would oxygenate the field for competition and innovation. Right now, Google is killing all the competition with their platform pricing power.

Engineers would be better compensated too, as more firms would have to compete for talent.

The hulking behemoth is bad for everyone, including Google itself.

> We shouldn't be fighting. We're powerless.

No we’re not. It’s okay for regulators to fix our mess in the meantime (though I wouldn’t get my hopes up), but we should teach others to see the imbalance and regain the power. This is the fight we should be fighting, and it’s the only sustainable way to go.

It absolutely feels like all the major web browsers have given up on being the User Agent, and instead act as the web developer's agent. I feel like I'm constantly fighting my web browser to do what I want rather than what the website wants.

Case in point which I'm fighting with at this very minute: HTTP. I want to access a site over HTTP, not HTTPS. I know it supports HTTP. I have used HTTP in the past. But my browser insists that I want HTTPS instead, despite my manually typing http://

HSTS is an abomination, directly ignoring the user's command to do what the site wants instead. As if I'm some kind of bystander of my computer, instead of the user.

In a negotiation, the goal is to reach an accommodation suitable for both parties. If the web developer doesn't want to set up his server on port 80 to serve HTTP, that's his business. Your user agent is still working for you, when it negotiates with the server what protocols it will accept. (It also negotiates a content type for the response; and if all the server has is static HTML, it's not your user agent's fault if what you get is HTML, even if you really wanted some other format. Take it up with the web developer, if you want the data in some other format. The browser is just doing its best for you.)

Your argument makes sense in one narrow circumstance which is not the typical HSTS setup: if the server is serving the site with plain HTTP on port 80 (and not just a redirect to the HTTPS version of the page), and also has a HTTPS version with HSTS headers. (So that the first time you visit the HTTPS version, your browser will insist on taking you to that version every time.)

There should definitely be a more convenient way to 'forget this site'. In Firefox it's hidden in right clicking on the site entry in History. For Chromium it seems to be a 7 step process unless invoking developer tools as History doesn't present a 1-click way to remove a whole site.

Edit: And for mobile even more obscure.

Out of curiosity, why do you want unencrypted HTTP when HTTPS is available?

why do you want to save a file unencrypted on your filesystem, when encryption is available?

Don't forget what search engine is default, what sponsored stories are shown, turn those off, it's suggested stories next. Oh your bookmarks, why not share those with us, browser experiments, ... Thought that's enoigh? No, let's disable APIs that ad blockers use and replace them using BS excuses. Don't get me wrong, the companies developing the browsers spend money that they have to make somehow on the other end but at least there used to be usable community driven browsers..

I was just talking about this with my wife. I have so many tabs open that I run out of memory but I find that all the solutions to save sites or resources I find and need to reference in the future are aweful. Bookmarks suck, search sucks, saving browser sessions sucks. I don’t have a good workflow and can’t even imagine one.

>I have so many tabs open that I run out of memory

Are you on Safari? If so even switching to Chrome would have helped, and if you are have more than a hundred tabs than use Firefox.

>Bookmarks suck, search sucks, saving browser sessions sucks

Completely agree as it has been the case for the last 25+ years since Tabs were invented.

I keep the Tabs opened as more like a ToDo-List. Saving me from going back and forth so I understand your frustration. Having drop down list in Chrome and Firefox allows you quickly Garbage collect from unused tabs. Which is already much better than the old days as this is a fairly recent additions. ( May be pass ~5 years )

Tree-Tabs sounds good in theory but in practice over the past 15+ years or so most of the tree tabs implementation dont work for me. Mostly an UI issue. Category of Tabs or sometimes called Tab Group seems to be the closest thing. I actually quite like Tab Groups on Chrome, and surprisingly Firefox over the years have tried many implementation but nothing like what chrome has offered ( at least by default )

I use Tab groups on both Safari and Chrome, one group for HN, one group for RSS feed. These two groups keep nearly 80-90% of new tabs generation for me already. So while it is not perfect it is a lot less of a mess than what I had. The rest are random thoughts that came up into my mind and I need some tabs research into it.

Safari is quite memory efficient and only stores metadata for inactive tabs, mostly the URL. I currently have 262 tabs in a single Safari window. Memory usage nothing or of the ordinary, a small fraction of my total.

I feel like I want a dedicated bookmarking app that integrates with the browser but is distinct from it. That has full "library management" features: nested folders AND tags AND something for more temporary storage.

Zotero can sort of work like this. It's designed as a reference management tool but you can use it to save more or less any web page. It can also save actual snapshots of the page which makes it nice for "really saving" a page in case it disappears (although these days a lot of sites have junk that makes it not work that well). It is a little awkward having it as a separate app though.

In theory, you could make it happen with:

- a db

- a db browser

- a {bookmarks,browser,etc}-to-db tool

For instance,

- sqlite

- datasette https://datasette.io/

- pocket-to-sqlite https://datasette.io/tools/pocket-to-sqlite

Furthermore, you could integrate e.g. Claude with this, by creating a lightweight model-context-protocol server that lets Claude browse through datasette. You would probably want to throw in a vector db in-between somewhere, so you could get semantic search over bookmarks to work nicely.

I think you want the "save tabs" feature of https://histre.com/ Not only can you restore the browser state, the search in histre is the best, if I can say so myself (it's mine). If you let histre save your browsing history, you don't even have explicitly save tabs or create bookmarks. You can just search to find anything you've ever touched.

https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/

> Bookmarks suck

They suck so bad lol. I bookmark something planning to look back at it the next day. I actually end up looking at the bookmark a year later thinking "oh ya, that".

There is a Firefox WebExtension that unloads memory from unused tabs, it works quite well. Enough that a window with many many tabs only uses about 10% of RAM on an 8GB machine. That might be a start.

https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html

The world would be a better place today if Android Chrome supported extensions. Users have so little control over their experience of using modern software. When the dominant browser on the most popular OS doesn't support extensions they just can't gain critical mass.

Extensions are the main reason I use Firefox on Android. I'm more committed to it there than I am on desktop.

Of course, Firefox also broke extensions on Android for several years, during which I mostly used a lightly tweaked Chromium build called Kiwi Browser.

> Of course, Firefox also broke extensions on Android for several years

Hmm, I didn’t really notice that. (I’m using Fennec F-Droid though, but it’s pretty close to the official Firefox build, with only a few minor tweaks.)

Could you tell me more about what was broken for you?

For several years, only "recommended" extensions could be installed, and the number available was extremely limited. Over time, some workarounds showed up, but broad extension support was absent from mid 2019 to late 2023.

Third party builds differed, of course.

Extensions do give the user more power - I guess that's part of the reason they are not available on mobile.

I think Brave could be a pioneer here and add a further point of differentiation by allowing extensions.

I agree 100% with the author's take. Whenever you have to reach for an extension, it means the browser has failed to do its job as the user's agent, and it's now the user's problem to correct this defect. I'd much rather a world where extensions didn't have to exist, because the browser acts on behalf of the user.

Have you read the article?

The author is playing with his own bookmarklets and extensions that will never be part of the browser, as it serves his own needs, not someone else’s.

For the browser to act as the user agent, it needs to be scriptable.

FWIW, Safari on iOS allows extensions. Same manifest-v3-like limitations as desktop Safari (only allowlist-based blocking), but otherwise it implements a decent chunk of webextension APIs.

Also on iOS, Orion supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions.

A step further than WebExtensions is customising the code in the Firefox omni.ja file. The next step after that you have to spend a lot of resources to recompile it.

https://github.com/SebastianSimon/firefox-omni-tweaks https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

I think the second one is just a userChrome.css tweak? It’s in between the WebExtensions and the omni tweaks I’d say.

userChrome tweaks can get you a long way – for example, I’ve reimplemented the Australis-like tabs (for the nostalgia sake, mostly) using that. Of course, the downside is those tweaks break with updates sometimes.

If you’re wokring on a userChrome tweak, you might want to enable devtools for the browser UI itself: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/browse...

I strongly believe if there was no browser, companies would have taken over the PDF viewers. Brochure files that let you select the product you want and then you email it back to them.

I understand why a lot of these extensions are not allowed, simply because of security issues. But I agree on RSS needs more work.

I continue to think RSS Reader should be a function of browser and shouldn't require a third party web or app to do it. In modern days I wish that could be married with a personal LLM so I could ask question about things I have read but I cant find it easily.

I like having my RSS as a separate entity of my browser. I have a server that runs an RSS aggregator (FreshRSS), and I can hit it via multiple clients, from the built-in web to a mobile app.

I have Orion from Kagi and Librewolf with privacy badger for retaking the shittywebs. its ok

i wonder if we'll ever see good user owned and operated personal "ai agents" or if the technology will just skip the cottage-hipster phase and jump straight to enshitification.

I think the computing requirements to run a local agent are high enough that it'll always be more niche than browsers and certainly unlikely on phones, which already means you're probably running it on the cloud or something.

I would suggest skepticism any time "always" is combined with "high compute requirement".