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Otter Browser Forum / Re: What would make Otter a Browser of Choice?
Currently, Opera 12 allows you to edit source and hit Apply Changes which is a soft-reload incorporating the changes you've made. The nicest thing is that if you make changes to any external css files or js files that the web page used, these changes will not be lost upon reload. You'd have to manually go to each css and js page and reload them individually to do that - which is great, as it means your changes wouldn't be lost. This is IMPOSSIBLE to do in Chrome or Firefox because the user is not allowed to open or edit files in the cache. I believe that the practice of disallowing the users from accessing the browser cache is overly restrictive on the user's freedoms. I want to be able to see what I've downloaded. Enough said.
The features missing in Opera 12 currently are:
1. Text Editor features:
Syntax highlighting. Currently there is only limited HTML syntax highlighting, and no CSS or Javascript code highlighting. If we implement the highlighting features available in text editors, for example Notepad++, then coding in Opera will be much nicer.
Code folding. There is no support in Opera for code folding.
Indent style.
Commenting.
Brace matching.
Line numbers.
Search which highlights every matching word - currently opera only highlights one matching word. The more advanced search would highlight all matching occurrences and only stop highlighting when the user closes the search box, so that clicking on an area outside of the search box does not close it or stop the highlighting.
Search which allows for Replace All and Regex.
Search through multiple files at once (search all open files, search all files linked from this file, search all files within the website hierarchy of this file).
2. Version control, autosaving and project management. For each file you should be able to click on a button like "save this as a separate version" that automatically increments the version number. You could also tick a box that says "minor changes" like from 12.0 to 12.01 or untick it to create a new version like 13. Furthermore the browser should keep a track of all the changes ever made to the document, and this list of changes should be persistent in the computer's hard disk so that even after you restart the browser you can still undo any changes you made before you closed it. Changes should be pushed to the hard disk as soon as they are made so as to avoid information loss due to power failure, computer crash or other unpredictable problems. This functionality would be similar to a keylogger except more intelligent - it doesn't log keypresses but changes to the files. There should also be an option to copy the project, with all the associated css, javascript files and so on over to an entirely new project so that you can implement a different set of features without affecting what you've already done. As everything is stored in cache, you should be able to tell the browser to move files in the cache to any folder you want and make the browser remember this change. The browser needs to remember where the cache file for each URL is stored, individually. There should be a "Apply All Changes" button that applies all your changes at once and soft-reloads the website. The browser should switch focus to the reloaded website immediately, like how an IDE that runs a program will automatically give that program focus.
3. Automatic structuring. Otter should be able to look at the source code for a page and immediately create a structure consisting of all the files which the page uses. Furthermore, it should be able to recognize that all javascript share the same execution environment so that one global variable declared in one javascript file can be accessed by other javascript files. Thus, there should be some kind of javascript "panel" that aggregates all the javascripts into one place, in execution order. Users should be able to not only see a list of all the files that the web page uses, the user should be able to click to open the file and immediately begin editing, and also drag multiple files into one window to "merge" them. This would make sense for CSS and Javascript for example, because separating them into different files or combining them into a single file makes no difference as the browser treats them as the same.
4. Better integration with the Inspector. There is currently an "Element Inspector" in most web browsers including Opera which includes a Console where you can see errors, you can click on the line number but you cannot edit it permanently! So it would be great if the ability to directly edit the file and Apply Changes was allowed in the Inspector itself. I know Chrome allows you to edit javascript in the Inspector but that's only after the javascript has already been loaded, which is too limiting for the purposes of web development. Otter should allow you to not only edit javascript and have it updated without reloading, but also edit it and then reload the page with the changes applied.
These are just a few of the changes I thought of. As they are, they are merely enhancements to what is already available in a relatively primitive form in Opera. However, I believe that with these changes Otter has the potential to become a very powerful web browsing/IDE hybrid. It has all the advantages of an IDE combined with all the advantages of a browser. I can definitely foresee this move as making web IDEs obsolete, as it will make web development orders of magnitudes easier.