Web Browser improvements
A thread dedicated to improving Web Browsers; what would like like to see removed, added, or work differently?
I'll start with a short list of things I'd love to see:
Better caching (and thus privacy)
- Completely ignore 'no-store' caching directive (cache everything)
- Never send conditional HTTP request headers (e.g, "If-Modified-Since") but do checking based HTTP response headers yourself (privacy)
- Previously browsed pages and resources will always be available offline and the user is asked whether the page should be updated or is allowed to connect to the Internet
- Always try to hit cache without making any connection to the server which had (or has) the resource you are requesting
- A portable, exportable cache storage format which is content-addressed with rich metadata
- Clearly indicate to the user that he is browsing a cached page and how long ago it was cached
- User-defined rules for URL de-duplication (make suggestions based on content with the same content hash but different URL)
- User-defined cache invalidation (e.g., invalidate CSS every X months)
- Keep track of which resource is dependent on what HTML document so it easy to delete web page(s) with all their resources (which are only used in those documents)
- A cache whitelist and blacklist based on Regex or something more simple
- Add WARC support
- Add "Remote caching" support
Better privacy
- Only send referrers on the same domain (sending no referrers can break some crappy sites)
- Always try to connect to HTTPS version of a domain (if it doesn't support it maybe optionally store it in a HTTPS blacklist)
- Decrease fingerprintability (Tor Browser does this quite well)
- Install uBlock Origin or uMatrix by default with a sane list of defaults
(Among other things I'll probably remember later)