Ask HN: Should site navs be part of the browser's UI?
Does anyone else find it frustrating that there's no consistent nav structure on all the websites they visit? No. Not at all. The Browser is my portal between sites on the internet. The Nav is my portal between pages on a site. I want them to remain consistent to themselves. The site has to have a uniform experience across all pages. And the browser needs to stay the same as I switch between sites. I need it to house my various tools and interfaces to best allow me to browse the internet as a whole. But what's that? If the Nav was in the Browser, it would still be consistent across a single site? Sure, but not all sites are created equal, and I need the Nav to be tailored to that site so I can interact with the site most efficiently. The Nav I use for HN would be wholly inappropriate for YouTube, and the Nav I use on Reddit would be overkill for my personal website. It's not just the navigation structure. It's the entire user experience. Every single website/app/service has its own custom UI and language. This needs to end. The solution is not to bring navigation to the browser. The solution is to get rid of all websites, and replace them with just one system. This is an interesting idea. Information architecture is a hard problem to solve and definitely not something that every site solves well. I imagine you are thinking of something like a universal hamburger menu built-in to the browser chrome. This is kinda what the <link rel="" /> stuff is meant to do, but from memory only opera supports it properly