Where the habit was learned

Habits the browser taught you

Nothing in this section is a browser fault. Every feature named here shipped because people asked for it, and every one of them makes the ordinary web easier to use.

A browser has an unusual brief. It has to open anything anyone puts in front of it, on any connection, without the person in front of it thinking about the software at all. Almost nobody picks a browser the way they pick a phone. They open the one that is already there. So the people who build browsers compete on the one axis a user actually feels, which is friction.

About twenty years of that competition produced the browser you have now. Nearly every feature in this section arrived because somebody complained. Retyping a password forty times a week was miserable, so the browser learned to fill it. Losing a screen full of tabs to a crash was miserable, so the browser learned to put them back. Reading a page in a language you do not have was impossible, so the browser learned to translate it. None of this was imposed on anyone. It was requested, loudly, for years, and the versions that refused lost.

Strip the features back and the job underneath is short. A browser remembers, predicts, fills in, restores and shares. That is most of what the frame around the page is for. Each of those five verbs is the same promise in a different form: the thing you did once, you will not have to do again.

Five verbs, and what each one assumes

Remembering assumes the record is worth keeping and that keeping it costs nothing, which is true of a supermarket login. Predicting assumes the most likely next thing is the right next thing, which is safe when only one site answers to that name. Filling in assumes a field belongs to the site it appears to belong to. Restoring assumes an address you had open an hour ago is one you want fetched again now, on whatever machine you are sitting at. Sharing assumes your other device is yours, and that a copy arriving there is a convenience rather than a copy.

Every one of those assumptions describes the ordinary web accurately. It has stable names, one owner per name, a registry behind the name, and a reasonable expectation that what your own hardware holds is your own business. A browser tuned for that world is tuned correctly, and the least helpful ones are the ones people abandon.

The part of the model that does not carry over

An onion address is not a name in the sense the browser means. There is no registry behind it, no owner a browser can look up, and nothing that would stop a second address from resembling the first closely enough to read past at a glance. The browser holds no opinion about any of that, because on the ordinary web the question of who owns a name is somebody else's job, and it has been somebody else's job for a very long time.

So the machinery keeps running, correctly, on input it was never shaped for. The password manager matches on the host, and an onion host is a host like any other. The session file stores addresses and restores addresses. The address bar sends what you typed to a search provider, because what you typed was not a complete address. The bookmark goes on pointing at whatever it was told to point at. Nothing in that list is a malfunction. It is documented behaviour, running in a place where the documentation's assumptions have quietly stopped holding.

There is a second difference that is less obvious. Everywhere else the cost of a convenience is small and you pay it yourself. Here, the record a convenience leaves tends to outlive the session that created it, sits in a folder nobody thinks of as storage, and is readable by anyone who later has the screen or the disk.

That is the whole of this section. Seven features, all of them sensible, most of them on by default in the builds people actually run. The pages are filed by where the habit came from and not by how much it costs, which is explained in how these pages work. If any of it reads as a telling off, it is not meant to, and nothing here is a mistake says so at length.

Remembers

Passwords, addresses, card details, form values and the set of pages you had open, kept in a profile folder on disk.

Predicts

Turns a partial name in the bar into a search, and a search into a ranked list somebody else ordered.

Fills in

Matches a stored entry against the hostname in front of it and offers the contents without being asked twice.

Restores

Re-requests the last set of addresses, sometimes long afterwards, sometimes on different hardware.

Shares

Copies logins, bookmarks and open tabs to everything else signed into the same profile.

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