[haiku-webkit] Emulating Chrome, at least in user interface

From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
To: haiku-webkit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:08:32 -0500
I am a big fan of Google Chrome. In my various thoughts and
brainstorms about a Haiku browser I was wanting to copy/emulate
several user interface (UI) features of Chrome:

- Not having a menu bar in favor of a few menu buttons at the end of
the toolbar (this provides more room for the web content.)

- A combination URL/search box instead of separate URL box and search
box (this cleans up the UI and can be faster to use.)

- Tabs at the top, which with the right design can also provide more
room for web content. I also had thoughts of finishing up the stack
part of Stack and Tile and using that instead of tabs inside the
window (I still really like this idea, especially if it was also used
in the Terminal and other tabbed apps.)

- No status bar at the bottom, just a small UI element that appears at
the bottom to show URLs when hovering over links/etc. This again
provides more room for web content.

- Downloads shown at the bottom of the tab they are downloaded from
instead of a separate downloads window. I've almost always found the
separate Downloads window in browsers awkward, with maybe the
exception of NetPositive since it had a standard location at the lower
right of the screen.

- The way searching inside a tab works, where the search pane just
drops down from the top of the content pane and shows a number of
matches with arrows to move between them. This is such a good and
intuitive UI I would also like to see it implemented in Terminal,
StyledEdit, etc. Separate find windows suck.

In addition Chrome has some interesting technical features:

- Web content runs in a separate sandboxed process. The crashing of a
single tab does not take down the whole browser. Security exploits
inside a web page cannot get into the OS or the main browser process.

- Extensions are pure JavaScript (if possible I think it would be
interesting to explore trying to support these extensions in our
browser, at least some basic ones.)

So my question is how much of the above (at least the UI features) are
you guys open to putting in WebPositive? I think we should at least
consider some of them instead of just copying the standard and
possibly outdated Firefox-style interface (and it is worth noting that
it looks like Firefox 4 will also be closely copying the Chrome UI.)

Since we are starting with a fresh and clean code base we have an
opportunity to create a very modern and innovative browser. Besides
just copying Chrome I would also be interested in rethinking some of
the current concepts of tabs, bookmarks, history to improve the
browser experience (like Mozilla is doing with their various Concept
Series contests.)

While I know we are still quite early in the development process, I
already see a lot of the "standard" browser features being
implemented, which is why I'm bringing this up now. I think it would
be nice if WebPositive was such an awesome yet still lightweight
browser that no one would care about downloading (or developing)
another browser.

Finally this isn't just a list of requests from me, I'm interested in
implementing them too. I just don't want to do a bunch of work which
the other developers don't want to use.

-- 
Regards,
Ryan
[haiku-webkit] Emulating Chrome, at least in user interface

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