Wandering Thoughts archives

2012-09-21

How I enter URLs in my browser

Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote in a comment on my alternative to bookmarks:

But that means when you open a new window, the address bar is a) already filled and b) not focused, right? I could not abide that...

One of my browser peculiarities is that in my primary browser I never type URLs in the address bar or otherwise modify the URL there; it's strictly read-only. I think that this goes back to when Firefox (or perhaps at the time it was Mozilla) acquired its first and terribly bad version of address bar autocompletion support, but the habit may even have predated that. Firefox has been doing things with hand-entered URLs that irritate me for a very long time.

My substitute has been a series of graphical widgets that I call up, enter a URL, and they bring up browser window for that URL (usually through Firefox remote control). The first version was a little TK program that I started from a window manager menu entry. The current version is part of my dmenu setup and is extremely fast to use; I hit F5, type the URL, hit return, and I'm done.

What this lacks is autocompletion, but another of my peculiarities is that I historically haven't liked the URL autocompletion that browsers do. Partly this is because many of the URLs that I enter by hand are URLs that I'm using for the first time and may never use again; throwing them in autocompletion results is just annoying clutter.

(Similarly bad things happen from mining my browser history for URL autocompletion, especially since I have a very, very big browser history. If I remember right, that was one of the problems with early versions of Firefox address bar autocompletion.)

Another answer is that if I ever want to use the address bar, it's only a keystroke away. Ctrl-L focuses the address bar and selects all of its current text, so you can do Ctrl-L and start typing to get the same effect as a focused and empty address bar. Ctrl-L is also a good way to get the current URL from the address bar in order to paste it into something else, such as an email message.

(Not that I usually remember this when I need to copy the URL out.)

MyUrlEntry written at 00:16:08; Add Comment

2012-09-20

My alternative to bookmarks: a page of links as the browser start page

For complex reasons beyond the scope of this blog entry, I am regularly browsing several sites with my 'testing' Firefox. Since I got tired of typing site names into the URL bar every time, I bookmarked the most common ones and then got reminded of how bad an interface bookmarks are and how much I dislike them. The big problem with bookmarks is that they are slow and inefficient because a pop-up menu is an extremely low-density and awkward way of presenting links (or really of presenting anything). Even nested menus don't really help present the links better and of course they make it even slower to actually use your bookmarks.

Fortunately there already is an excellent format for presenting links to people, one that has a high density, is quick to use, and allows great expressiveness in grouping and organizing links. We call this format 'web pages'. Thus for years I have had my browser's start page set to something that looks like this (except with many more links, any number of which I don't really use any more and some of which I'm not sharing publically):

Google (Translate), python.org (docs).
Work: support wiki, <redacted others>.

Planets: Hacker News, Planet Sysadmin, Sysadmin Planet.

Weather: Environment Canada Toronto.

[....]

The basic idea is straightforward: I want every link that I commonly use to be on this page with a brief label, reasonably intelligently laid out in some setup that makes things easy to find. Of course this is not the only way that I access these links (I have a quick command line interface for some, for example), but it's still very frequently used.

(If you want to de-clutter the main page or you have a lot of a certain sort of links, you can make additional pages and put links to them on your main page. Some of my less frequently used or more distracting links live on separate pages.)

This works amazingly well, to the point where I can't find any more words to explain how well because it's so much what I'm used to that it's just how things should be. As my recent experiences have reminded me, the difference between this and bookmarks is night and day. Not only is it faster and more convenient, it easily copes with enough links to crush any bookmarks menu. You might think that scanning through all of the text to find links would be slow, but this is not my experience. After a while I'm not even really reading the text to find links; I already know where on the page the link I want is and I just home in on it.

(I know this crushes bookmarks for usability because I used to try to use bookmarks and my main browser actually still has a quite large collection of them from that era. In practice my bookmarks collection became a black hole; I'd add things and then practically never use the bookmarks menu to get at them. I should probably delete all or almost of them, since I haven't really looked at my bookmarks in years.)

You could put such a start page on a web server somewhere and it'd work fine. I use local files on my machines for two reasons; first, I want this page to work pretty much no matter what and second, reading a local file is faster than pausing to make a HTTP request every time I open a new window.

(I didn't come up with this idea on my own. I'm pretty sure that I got it from someone else on the Internet although I've long since forgotten any details.)

Oh, and another advantage of doing 'bookmarks' this way is that they can naturally be synchronized across browsers and across machines since your entire bookmarks collection is just one or more HTML file(s). You can freely copy them around, version control them, back them up, and so on.

BookmarksAlternative written at 02:42:42; Add Comment


Page tools: See As Normal.
Search:
Login: Password:
Atom Syndication: Recent Pages, Recent Comments.

This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.