A few of my thoughts regarding Iron

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alinescoo
Posts: 13
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2009 7:49 pm

A few of my thoughts regarding Iron

Post by alinescoo »

Hi all, I am a Software Engineer and I would like to share my impressions after doing an intensive test with Iron.
First of all I am really impressed how the Dev team managed to implement the Adblocking feature simulating the "Content Policy" included in Firefox. I am really curios how you managed to implement this. As I have seen, the ads are blocked before loading, am I correct ? It's almost like Iron has some sort of internal proxy that filters content. Great work, makes user experience very pleasant and the speed of browsing is increased because of all the connections not being made. Only one or two things to comment here: it would be great to have the possibility to add new filters in adblock.ini directly from Iron window. If you take a look at AdBlock+ extension for Chrome (which only hides ads) you can see that if you press Alt+B you can select elements on a page and when clicking on them you can see the address and you can ad new filters. This would make this feature complete. It would also be great to have the possibility for a tab to see what filters are active (from adblock.ini) and with checkboxes the user could be able to enable/disable some of them.

As I am a developer I put great consideration in final user experience. To make the using of Iron more ergonomic I suggest two improvements that could be used by a large number of users and I think it could be done in a small amount of time.
1. Mouse gestures - There is a great extension for Chrome that takes care of Mouse Gestures in here: http://code.google.com/p/nk-gesture/ .The only problem is that it doesn't work in all pages. This is because of Chrome internal extension management. For instance it doesn't work on a new tab page or on a file:// page etc. If Iron's Dev team could take a look of this, I am sure that they could manage to implement this feature to be available on all tabs. There are some Chromium projects that have this feature implemented and it works great.

2. Drag and drop option - I often feel the need to take a word found on a page and google it or take an address and copy it into the address bar. This Drag and drop function could take care of this issues. If I select a word with the mouse and drag it, Iron should open a new page with google results for this word. If the select words are like www. then a new tab should be open loading the selected address.

This are only my 2 cents. Probably the Dev team is very busy and won't be taking in consideration these suggestions. I really hope that the requests being made in this forum will be taken in consideration someday, because without users an application can't exist. I have followed the evolution of this application for a long while now. It didn't convinced me to make it the default browser, mainly because of mouse gesture support, BUT, I hope that new features will be implemented soon. I still have some more suggestions but these 2 are mainly the most important ones.

Thank you for reading this. Please share feedback. I wish you all a nice and productive day.
dogstar
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Nov 24, 2009 1:48 am

Re: A few of my thoughts regarding Iron

Post by dogstar »

Just a thought from the peanut gallery, but the drag and drop suggestion you have made seems somewhat superfluous when you can highlight a word and right click then tell Iron to search in google. I don't believe this feature needs to be enabled, perhaps you hadn't noticed it.
odyssee
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Dec 04, 2009 11:25 pm

Re: A few of my thoughts regarding Iron

Post by odyssee »

when you're used to super drag and drop, you need it ;) right clicking, and choosing a search engine is a click more
by chance there's an extension for that here http://www.chromeextensions.org/tabs/super-drag-and-go/
I agree with Alinescoo
and about adblocker I would like to be able to set exceptions, and I'd like the process to be more transparent
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