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Brendan Tompkins [MVP]

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New IE Features I'd like to see ... all my dumb ideas.

So, when I was thinking about new IE features that I'd like to see (like “Grabby Scrolling“), I thought of a bunch of stuff. In hindsight, most of the following ideas are either just plain dumb, won't work, unnecessary or all of the above. But, since I'm blogging and putting off my next project, i thought I'd post them here:

Multiple Home Pages: the idea here would be to allow multiple home pages to be defined. I usually have 4 or 5 sites that I go to every day, that are equally essential. I'd like to have a drop-down on my home button that gives me the option to go to any of my pre-defined home pages.. Kinda dumb idea, if I do say so myself.

Print Regions: Like Excel, I could define a print region of my page. That way I can just select an area of a page to print, without ads, etc. Why is this dumb? I'm not sure really, it's kinda confusing, and the UI for this wouldn't work very well.

Magnetic Mousing: When I move my mouse near a clickable object, it snaps to that object's center. This is a terrible idea. I'd hate this.

My Keywords: Define your keywords up front, and if you navigate to a page that has that word or phrase on it, you're alerted. Bad idea. How stupid do I think I am that I can't do this with my own eyes that god gave me?

Shared Favorites: This would hook into messenger, or something like that so you could share favs with a buddy. This is already out there. Stupid idea, and someone else got to it first.

Surf Later: An option when you right click on a link that creates some sort of to do list somewhere. Um. What do I think IE is, friggin Outlook?

So there they are, all my dumb IE ideas. Now I can get on with my life. ;)

-Brendan

Published May 13 2004, 07:51 AM by Brendan Tompkins

Comments

Steve Hiner said:

Surf Later sure would clean up my desktop. Right now it's packed with links to pages I thought I'd eventually check out.

# May 13, 2004 7:21 AM

Darrell said:

How about this?

The opposite of the "Shrink images to fit in browser windows" - EXPAND images to take up the entire browser window.

# May 13, 2004 8:24 AM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Yeah! D That'd be cool. How about "Draggy Images" you could drag and drop them to your desktop...

# May 13, 2004 8:27 AM

TomRowton said:

Multiple homepages - that's one of my favorite things about the Firefox Tabbed Browser Extensions - save a tab session, rename it, open it up. Even set a given set of tabs as your startup state(available in plain old Firefox, IIRC)

Print Regions - Select an area of a page. Type or click whatever to pull up the Print dialog - you should see, on the left, a radio-button array - All, Selection, Range x to y.
Sure, it doesn't auto-filter out the adds, but it gives most of what you want, I think.

Surf later - kind of an automate "Create a bookmark in my Follow-up Folder"? Ok, I'll buy that, but Furl makes this rather easy, and allows you to share with friends. I like it, though, but isn't that what bookmarks are, in a general sense?

# May 13, 2004 8:48 AM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Tom..

I did download Firefox yesterday, after reading your comments. I've been playing with it.

The print regions idea is different from the print selected, which every windows app has, (i think). This would let you use a marching ants style selection to choose an area of the screen, due to the werido selection problem most browsers have.

If you're like me, bookmarks is like a graveyard of old links. Surf later would have to have some sort of in your face feature that would discourage just putting garbage there.

Thanks for the good comments!
-B

# May 13, 2004 9:07 AM

TomRowton said:

Ahh, I see! Nice idea, that(Print Regions). Maybe just tell your printer to ignore images to cut the ads?

On the Graveyard of Unvisited Links, yes, I have a buttload of "I'll just go back to that later" bookmarks. And rss(I use bloglines) just makes it works because I "surf" much more than I would have before.

I think that speaks to a deeper issue - if you have things you want to get back to but never do because there's more NEW and IMPROVED things you want to get back to, I'm not sure that can be solved with software. For links that I really, truly, honestly, no-kidding want to check out again, I have a silly ritual. Bookmark it. Furl it. Send Link to Desktop. Email to 2 webmail accounts and my "real" account.

And that's just silly. I should SKIM less and READ more. I shouldn't worry what I might be missing out on by actually paying attention to my current reading material.

That's just me though. I get overloaded rather easily. I think the baby ate my brain.

# May 13, 2004 9:38 AM

Darrell said:

If you're using Mozilla, you can right-click on images and if they come from an ad server (or even just some domain you don't like), you can tell Mozilla to *never* download images from there. It's absolutely beautiful. Yahoo Mail is *really* fast now.

# May 13, 2004 3:45 PM

q said:

you need a hobby

# May 14, 2004 4:15 AM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Come on q - it's a beautiful day outside in New England. Why are you inside surfing blogs anyhow?

# May 14, 2004 4:27 AM

q - quinn wilson said:

I hope I am not your spammer! I promise to keep my stupid comments - meant in fun - to myself.

The weather was not so great on Friday. And like most, I am too busy working to leave the office.

# May 17, 2004 12:21 AM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Ha! Nope. Not you! I got a comment that I had to delete with foul language, etc.. I think I was just on a checking IP# kick for the afternoon!

Cheers- Brendan

# May 17, 2004 1:58 AM

Dave Massy's WebLog said:

# June 17, 2004 4:33 AM

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About Brendan Tompkins

Brendan has been programming with .NET since the first public beta and is owner and operator of Port Technology Services, a consultancy company providing .NET application development services to the Maritime industry. In July, 2007, he was awarded the Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET. He's also a proud co-founder of failed .COM startup Intrinsigo, and has had a hand in the failure of numerous other businesses. He currently runs CodeBetter.Com and Devlicio.us, and lives in Norfolk, Virgina with his wife Tiara and son Ian.