lucasw's Journal: Auto browsing

The recent versions of Opera have really improved my web browsing throughput. Gestures have been around a while, but I really like the new 'Open all folder items'. I made a folder full of webpages I find interesting that are updated frequently, and once a day or less frequently I can just open them all up and plow through. It requires a lot less thought and energy than specifically remembering to go to each individually and laboriously clicking on each link in the bookmarks menu in succession. I find that I can keep track of a couple dozen pages this way rather than just slashdot and one or two others.

Pages that aren't updated frequently aren't too problematic, it's easy to see the contents are the same and close the window- it gets tiresome if this goes on for a few weeks with no update, so it would be nice if the web browser could automate this and check for updates itself before bringing up a page. There could also be different prioritization and queueing schemes, where if you get bored of browsing through the usual one day the unseen (but loaded) pages would come up first the next session.

It's like an inbox for web pages.

One feature that should be added to the gestures and 'back' buttons is that the browser should recognize that going 'back' from a newly opened window should mean either closing the window or flipping to the window that spanned the new one. I'll be browsing, unaware that I'm in a new window and all of a sudden find the back button has hit the wall and doesn't work anymore. It's too much effort to make that realization and then close the window with a different action.