Basic things that browsers lack:
- hooks between network steps
- hooks between steps while rendering/interacting with a website
Things that I want to do but I can't: - catch a request and modify it, e.g. when a webpage tells my browser to visit ajax.googleapis.com/jquery.js then my browser SHOULD NOT DO IT. Seriously, just don't start running shit on my computer when I click something. Noone wants that, apart from Google. Not the users. I should be able to modify that request, and serve jquery from somewhere else.
- stop the browser's javascript execution
- run my own javascript (these two are currently unavailable together, if you don't allow javascript on a webpage, then you can't run your own) (or modify HTML/DOM in some other language)
I don't think Firefox is worth supporting, I believe it is a Trojan Horse of Google (or at least a Useful Idiot), and its existence is the main reason we have exactly 0 browsers (open source or proprietary) right now. It should die, so something else might flourish.