Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 13:46:40 +0100
From: Roger Espel Llima
Subject: browser ideas

I just saw the Express webpage... with a good toolkit like gtk and a
working html widget like gtk/XmHTML, I get the impression that this
could give good results in a relatively short time, so I'm excited :)

I have a bunch of ideas about what a free browser should do, so I'm
posting them with this mail...   I can't promise to work on Express,
because I'm not familiar with gtk programming, but anyway, I hope
these ideas wil be useful.

. control and security: in a free web browser, it makes sense that 
  all control of the browser should be in the hands of the user, in
  priority to the webserver.  

  netscape & co let the client be controlled by the server in a whole
  bunch of ways, from "meta equiv"s to cookies to java(script) to
  automatically following redirects.  a user-supported browser ought to
  take the opposite approach: the client user is in complete control,
  and things like automatically followign redirects or meta equiv's, or
  storing/sending cookies, need to be considered "suggested behavior
  that the user may want or not", and alwasy be configurable.  

  things like meta-equivs, if turned off, could put an alert in the
  status bar or in the title bar or at the top of the webpage itself,
  and a button or menu entry would let you follow the meta-equiv,
  when _you_ want.

  the same principle applies to colors and fonts: the user should be
  able to specify if color/font information from pages should be
  honored, and to which extent.  it'd be nice, for example, to be able
  to tell the browser "use always a font size of at least 12pt".

  it should be possible to turn off all potentially annoying html/http
  features, like blinking, javascript, body-backgrounds, bgsounds,
  cookies  (if they're implemented at all).

. if java/javascript is added, it'd be neat if the user could view a
  list of running applets and js threads, possibly with their memory
  usage and the possibility to kill them (or even suspend and resume
  them).  there should be a button or hotkey for "kill all running
  java/javascript on the currently displayed page" (or one for java and
  one for javascript; the JS one would also deactivate the onBlah
  hooks, etc). 

. ad removal: let the user have a list of url patterns from which
  images will not be loaded.   (they don't need to be true regexps:
  shell-patterns with *, ? and [] are enough, and they're really fast to
  match).  if an IMG tag's SRC falls matches one of the patterns, just
  do as if the tag wasn't there at all (so you don't even get a broken
  image icon).

. more generally: per-site configurability!  it'd be just great to 
  have a list of url patterns with flags associated to them.  some
  flags could be:

C - allow cookies from this domain  (and the opposite flag: junk them)
I - auto-load images on pages from this domain  (and the opposite flag: don't)
S - enable javascript on pages from this domain  (or disable it)
J - same with java
E - ignore embedded content (<IMG> and similar) to be loaded from this domain 
    (ad removal)

(all these flags look at the URL for the html page that is being loaded,
 except the last one, which looks at the URL on IMG, BGSOUND and similar
 tags, and ignores the tag if it matches).

-- 
Roger Espel Llima