new intentionality-oriented browser-replacement
- one of the issues with current browsers is that they're all built for the masses (including Arc, although I was briefly optimistic otherwise)
- they're all trying to be sort of generic and inoffensive
- vs opinionated
- they offer some modularity ofc via extensions, and via the content that you view
- but they really have barely thought about actual workflows etc
- SO LITTLE IS ACTUALLY DESIGNED
- (and a lot of what is is out to get you)
- random thing: on mac it needs a fake fullscreen/chromeless mode that's not OS-level fullscreen with all of its attendant window-management issues
- oh snap yeah I guess it could just be chromeless, and then you can position it however you want
- so you could have two chromeless side-by-side
- things that subvert website-designer intent where it conflicts with user intent
- a tool for building new UIs on top of old ones
- I'm not sure exactly how this would work... I'm imagining something like...
- the main use-case it would solve is basically you can go to twitter.com and without using the API you can interact with tweets etc, where the browser is really loading the page as you, but then that's hidden underneath
- this might theoretically violate TOS, but quite it's hard to make a clear case that it does without catching up a bunch of other stuff in its wake
8 linked references
March 10th, 2024
- hmmm this maybe does a lot of what I want
March 8th, 2024
- Oliver Sauter recommended
- rabbit AI assistant - large action model trained on web interaction
- webarchiver browser extension for snapshots
January 20th, 2024
- I forget if I wrote this somewhere yet, but some ability to right-click on a link and tell it to save for after the current thing
- really important to preserve start-to-end on one thing, rather than getting too into stack mode
- in terms of different contexts/spaces, I actually want it to NOT be easy to switch between them
- like there should be different PROJECTS, MAYBE
- but anything resembling work/home or work/play should have some sort of barrier between them
- like a 5-min delay
- or even having to go outside or walk around the block
- or it could be something like saying out loud "I'm done work for now, I'm heading home" although eh that could be a bit passive aggressive
January 18th, 2024
- (not a full thread but it could be)
January 14th, 2024
- getting chromium set up
January 11th, 2024
- oh shit, it is occurring to me that insofar as someone's work happens IN a browser, then to a large extent the puzzle is to create a virtual WORLD (not in a VR sense, although,,,) that does not merely REPRESENT the work needing to be done but PRESENTS it
- ie obsoleting to-do lists by simply being interact-with-able state, like a messy room
- this is an ecstatically cool premise but I think in practice it breaks down for many reasons
- some work IS representational; it's the manipulation of representations
- some work needs to be represented differently to different people
- altho in this sense also a messy room is also a representation, not just a presentation
- insofar as you need to store information about the vision/target/goal/aim/reflev/reference level, not just the current state of the work-in-progress... well, that's necessarily going to be a representation! you can present the work-in-progress but you can only represent the envisioned state
- huh, that's a wild insight
January 8th, 2024
- I want more customizable workflows/macros
- like "automatically close tabs [this often | under this situation] when they match [these criteria]"
- which enables
- "max 5 tabs open" like Jess was doing
- "close inactive tabs every 12h" like Arc defaults to
- "close inactive tabs every 5am" like I wish Arc did maybe
- and it should probably also have better tagging/archiving of closed tabs
- including that certain sites would be treated as not-intentional in the sense of like, "you can forget about this tab" whereas other tabs represent something like an intention to read something
- automatically disabling/enabling certain extensions/userstyles based on
- times of day
- hotkeys
- < other conditions? >
- automatically fiddle around on this page so that it doesn't auto-log-out!
- I want extensions to be much more powerful
- and ALSO to have their power user-determined
- rather than enabling all permissions on installing, you can
- install then progressively enable permissions
- enable permissions only on some sites or some contexts
- various abilities I would like to see
- change the theme or parameters of the theme
- ....hmm that's the main one. there are probably other things but they'll depend on some of the other parameters of the new design
- how does it related to "web apps"
- seems there are a few categories, some of which are sort of like "always-open" apps like I do with intend, roam, workflowy, gcalendar
- the system keeps track of your current intention, natively/internally
- additionally! it can also interface with a particular kind of API for getting & setting current intention
- and intend.do is offered as one such interface for that
- but you can also plug it into something else
- even a relatively non-[presence/workflow]-oriented task-manager could be retrofitted to have something tagged as a "current intention" although it's sorta unclear what the benefit would be
- so it's like it comes with a built-in version of the momentum extension
- but one that extends beyond the new tab page and affects the very structure of things
- it could also have something like one main workflow that involves something like journalling/streaming/writing
- where you type about what you're doing, and then you can open tabs/quests based on that
- vaguely wanting to call this portend as a mashup of portal and intend, but that's probably a terrible name. might as well just use a fake word at that phase
- one property this has is that if you remotely set your intention to something new, when you get back to your computer, it should have everything else HIDDEN
- what would the MVP of this be for just me?
- I think basically a chromium-like that auto-changes the whole browser color based on current intend nexa, would be pretty satisfying for me personally to use
January 2nd, 2024
- the idea of "web browser" is woefully out of date
- maybe what I make will also get called a browser, like we call smartphones "phones"
- but I want to take seriously the idea of making something new in kind, and not limit it by conceiving of it as a "browser" first and foremost
- to a large extent I am orienting to building an operating system, I just don't want to do kernel stuff (at this phase anyway) and the internet is a nice modular abstraction layer already, where the engine is very cross-platform etc
- random desiderata
- intentionality
- for the system to have a sense of "what am I doing right now?" that affects both the structure and the style of the UI
- if you go to do a small thing, it hides all the other stuff in various ways
- once complete a thing, it gives space between you and seeing all the other stuff you have open
- many things that affect the way that open tabs can be used as implicit "tasks"
- arc handles this in some creative ways, with default archive (but their archive is shit)
- in a sense I want the fundamental unit to be the intention, and then tabs and pages and apps are tools in service of the intention
- and intentions here could include sort of exploratory fuck-around intentions
- extensions
- more powers, of various kinds
- ability to remove sites