I like firefox, but I want something lighter and that stable. Recently I tried qutebrowser and it was constantly crashing and breaking.Any suggestions ?

There are quite a few options. You may want to look into something like vimb or vimprobable. I'm not a big fan of those ones. I like Uzbl, it takes a bit of configuring, as well as vimb and vimprobable. There is also Midori, Luakit, Seamonkey etc.
I'm still using FF but one day I will get around to using Uzbl.

I've probably used every single minimal browser out there but i always just go back to FF. Just customize it to fit your needs and use it, there really isn't much better. And i've been gone for awhile but the last time i heard Uzbl wasn't being actively developed.

Dillo, not the easiest to use but seems stable & is light weight.

^^ what Mafia says.
FWIW, browsers like uzbl and dwb, and others pull in ridiculous dependencies (gdbus,dbus,at-spi2-core,libgtk3 ...) That may or may not matter for you.
For me, the two browsers to have installed are FF/IW and Dillo.
FF + ublock + Pentactyl

Most lightweight browsers are based on WebKit (e.g. qutebrowser, dwb, luakit, ...), some are based on WebKit2 (e.g. lariza or GNOME's "Web"). Both engines work okay for most web sites. WebKit2 appears to be much more stable, but it's slower and not really suitable for old/slow computers. Sadly, there are enough web sites out there that crash both engines or make them crawl to a halt. That's why I use Firefox at work -- I can't afford a crash.

Yes, it's almost always WebKit's fault when one of those lightweight browsers crashes. I don't blame the WebKit guys, though. Have you tried writing or porting a web rendering engine? I have not, but I do know that this is an insanely complex task.

(Due to WebKit2's design, lariza does not fully crash. Instead, the crashing tab reloads. Still annoying.)

QtWebEngine is rather new: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine. It uses Chromium as a backend. Some quick tests of mine showed promising results, but a full port of lariza to QtWebEngine is still on my TODO list. Last time I checked, QtWebEngine was not yet complete. And as far as I know, there is no browser (yet) which uses QtWebEngine.

tl;dr: At the moment, it's Firefox. Let's wait for some QtWebEngine browser.

Tried out vimb for awhile, lack of extensions was painful, I use roughly 15 when on Firefox. Firefox for me still runs like a dream (Having only switched from chrome recently) so I have no reason to switch.

Like we said in the podcast:

Quote:> Usually firefox, not my favorite but the one that makes sense.
> I stick with firefox because of the addons and customization.
> It's a good webdev browser.

I will also like to say FF because of security reasons. It is by far more secure than something such as Luakit, UZBL, DWB, etc.

I've been messing with uzbl lately, and it doesn't seem too bad. To be frank, the only problems I have had with minimalist dedicated browsers involve feeding my YouTube addiction. Flash (and HTML5) really hate dwb and uzbl, in my experience.

I haven't heard of the security of those minimalist browsers though. Why are they insecure compared to good old Firefox?

IIRC you can auto open videos with mpv/mplayer with dwb.

I've tried it with uzbl. I'll check it out with dwb.

(24-06-2015, 11:09 PM)Laserswald Wrote: I've been messing with uzbl lately, and it doesn't seem too bad. To be frank, the only problems I have had with minimalist dedicated browsers involve feeding my YouTube addiction. Flash (and HTML5) really hate dwb and uzbl, in my experience.

I haven't heard of the security of those minimalist browsers though. Why are they insecure compared to good old Firefox?

Would you use uzbl or dwb to check your bank account opposed to firefox?

I don't see why I wouldn't. I'm rather ignorant of the specifics when it comes to https when uzbl or dwb. Do they have specific security issues?

(28-06-2015, 12:29 PM)Laserswald Wrote: I don't see why I wouldn't. I'm rather ignorant of the specifics when it comes to https when uzbl or dwb. Do they have specific security issues?

They are really outdated.

Excellent point. Unfortunately, pentadactyl doesn't support my version of FF. More exploration is needed.

Have you tried the nightly version of pentadactyl. I hear you though, once you go penta, its hard to go back, even vimperator doesn't quite do it.

(28-06-2015, 06:02 PM)October Wrote:

(28-06-2015, 12:29 PM)Laserswald Wrote: I don't see why I wouldn't. I'm rather ignorant of the specifics when it comes to https when uzbl or dwb. Do they have specific security issues?

They are really outdated.

Outdated because nobody has worked on it in awhile? Or outdated because everything about it is obsolete? I would also like to know that security issues question.

I always play with uzbl and end up back on firefox or in moments of instanity, chromium.

Been using firefox for years. Tried jumanji, luakit, dwb & xombrero, but I've never found the same workflow that I have with firefox. The latter tends to be annoying, the startup time is longer and longer with all the addons, and I'm very impatient. I think I will try something else, need for change.

"best" is a subjective term

I spend half my time in qutebrowser on sane websites that are XHTML and are pre-css3 garbage (i.e. reddit, github, nixers, lobste.rs), and the other half in inox, because "modern" websites are actually broken (twitter, youtube, outlook - for school). Not that I'm salty.

I too have tried everything similar to vimperator and/or minimalist/lightweight. But when I was using 43.0.1 I had almost instant startup time. I was also under 800MBs total... now I had to let it update because some library changed, and at 45.0.2, I am taking up 1.30GBs or more on average... I only use chromium in app mode for netflix, with vimium, which isn't as good in my opinion.

I have heard that firefox wants to stop letting users use certain extensions, and that they want to follow chrome/chromium's tab-per-process idea. And at 4GBs sometimes running both browsers 'cause of netflix, that sucks. If Qutebrowser gets better for extensions/stylish/css stuff I would be ecstatic.

Now I'm using surf.

It sucks, but I have come to the conclusion that avoiding the web outside of work will
keep me sane.

I have found a way of reading blog.fefe.de in my terminal, with curl blog.fefe.de | skip '<' '>' | fmt | less.

Works like a charm, haven't tried it for other websites yet.

When I first looked for lightweight web browsers, I thought they was all broken. But then, I slowly learned that it was the web that was broken.

As an example: surf crash on linuxforums.org with JavaScript enabled. But it is just a forum! How can a forum crash a web browser?

I like how Midori have many feature like NoJS, ad-blocking, ability to have no interface but the tabs, `space` at the end of the page looks for a "next" link and goes to the next page...

But it also crash sometimes. At least, when surf crash, it is only for one page. No need for "tab isolation" like chrome does :P

---

I like text-mode web browsers, as they feel lighter than the others:

Lines of source code (<code>wc -l *.[ch]</code>):

I know the amount of lines of code is not a proof of quality, but I like software that are both simple by their implementation and by their usage.

What I like with retawq is that it barely does anything: render page + display them in a pager + navigate to links, with a limited number of keybindings:


Yet it handles all these protocols, and is my client of choice for those.

- http/https/local files
- ftp/ftps
- News (NNTP)
- Finger
- local CGI scripts

(14-06-2016, 03:37 PM)pranomostro Wrote: curl blog.fefe.de | skip '<' '>' | fmt | less

If you encounter pages for which this neat trick does not work, retawq could help, maybe.

"I want a lighter web browser than Firefox."
"Here's a list of WebKit browsers..."

You sadists. :-)

(14-06-2016, 03:37 PM)pranomostro Wrote: curl blog.fefe.de | skip '<' '>' | fmt | less

Neat. I should make an alias for that.

-e- skip: not found - OK, no alias.

Just a shameless bump to this thread.

Quote:Browsers, your windows to the internet. What do you use, customize, problems you've stumbled upon, the ties with your Unix system.

Should I create a "warp zone" between the threads?

(14-06-2016, 03:37 PM)pranomostro Wrote: curl blog.fefe.de | skip '<' '>' | fmt | less

maybe not as minimal, but sometimes i like to pipe webpages through pacdoc and view them in man

I'm a big fan of both dwb and qutebrowser. However using them is a bit of a security nightmare as both use old webkit libraries. See the below comment from the arch wiki:

Quote:Warning: The following browsers are based on one of three webkit ports that are today considered insecure and outdated. GTK+ browsers should be switching to webkit2gtk and Qt browsers to qt5-webengine (Blink). More info here.
https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/...y-updates/

Note even surf used the old webkit library last time I checked.

For me, the ultimate browser would have a minimal interface that can be fully integrated with my window manager. I don't want my browser to care about tabs and windows, let my window manager handle that. Additionally let me use the program I want to manage urls and bookmarks.

(15-06-2016, 07:41 AM)beetle Wrote: For me, the ultimate browser would have a minimal interface that can be fully integrated with my window manager. I don't want my browser to care about tabs and windows, let my window manager handle that. Additionally let me use the program I want to manage urls and bookmarks.

Agree. I didn't do any sensitive browsing whilst testing most of the minimalist browsers out there. Ones like jumanji used a plain text file so you could interact with bookmarks and urls much easier. Though you could possibly script in some functionality you're after with firefox and whatnot.

I use this to access my bookmarks without having to have firefox open, which is handy if you need to play a video from youtube with mpv.
Though I also use a dmenu script to search youtube and playlists and such more so.