Web browsers—despite their diversity of histories, intents, and development paradigms—largely mirror each other’s user interfaces with traditional drop-down menus (a.k.a “File” menus), either in the standard place or under a top/right corner button, an address/search bar just right of the main navigation button cluster, tabs either above or below it, and the view area below it. Aside from adding tabs and hiding the menu bar under a button, very little about the user interface has changed in well over a decade of web browsers, and that is unfortunate. Considering the enormous expansion of the web browser’s duties (desktop apps are starting to be replaced by online alternatives) and the time an average person uses them, filtering this experience through an architecture from fifteen years ago seems anachronistic.
Well, thanks to increasingly extensible and sophisticated browser core technologies, this situation can be easily remedied! I’ve developed a different user interface to complement my preferred hardware setup (both my work and home systems use tablet pointing devices instead of mice) and make controlling the browser less consciously involved. It’s built on open-source and freely extensible software, so in that spirit I am publishing everything needed to replicate (and, hopefully understand/enjoy) my setup here.