Re: Epiphany strategy vs. Firefox

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Apr 27, 2008, at 7:30 PM, Dylan McCall wrote:
> ...
> I think meeting Firefox 3's notable features could be quite easy for
> Epiphany because its design is very flexible already. For example, I am
> working on a patch to add a "quick bookmark" button, which creates a
> bookmark with the page's name and a "Miscellaneous" tag on one click,

(How would "Miscellaneous" be better than no tags at all?)

> then pops up the bookmark editor on a second click. We already have 
> most of the stuff in place to replicate the feature :)

Even better than Firefox would be to automatically save the contents of 
a page when you bookmark it (perhaps up to a maximum of 1 MB or so per 
page). That way when you search your bookmarks, you can search their 
contents, not just their titles (you're more likely to remember text 
from the contents than to remember a title you might not have even 
noticed). And if the page ever disappears, or when you're offline, 
you'll still have a copy of the page to refer to.

> ...
> Oh, as for crazy features: How about the browser being able to watch
> changes for bookmarked pages? It could periodically check for changes,
> and when such occurs, it could promote the bookmark somehow. That could
> be done via RSS feeds and page scraping.
> ...

Netscape versions 2~4 did this (minus the feeds part, of course), with 
a "What's New?" menu item in the Bookmarks window. It worked okay in 
the early '90s, when most Web pages were static. But now that most Web 
pages are served dynamically, they often contain trivial changes (e.g. 
a "Latest headlines" sidebar, or a copyright statement containing the 
current year), and the last-modified date sent by the Web server is 
more often wrong than right. So detecting whether a page has 
significant changes is now an AI-class problem.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/