> hoping to read a compiled list of obscure inconveniences that have prevented you from using alternative browsers.

I've tried all of the previous lightweight vim-like incarnations of the webkit2-lib based browsers. Not being much of a browser customisations person beyond adblocking my issues were solely with the inadiquate browser engine "webkit2" which was ultimately abandoned, it was always slow to be updated, increadibly slow and insecure.

This is why I thought qutebrowser was worth a post on HN, because it's the first of these lightweight keyboard driven type browsers that I have found with a completely useable modern up-to-date engine behind it (QTWebEngine[1]):

    Relationship to Chromium
    
    Qt WebEngine uses code from the Chromium project. However, it is not containing
    all of Chrome/Chromium:
    
    - Binary files are stripped out
    - Auxiliary services that talk to Google platforms are stripped out
    - The codebase is modularized to allow use of system libraries like OpenSSL
    
    We do update to the latest Chromium version in use before a Qt release. After a
    release some bug fixes and security patches are backported. For LTS releases of
    Qt we might also update Chromium in a patch level release.

This is why it basically feels like using chrome, because it's essentially the same core engine.

I've not used qutebrowser extensively enough yet to comment much on the front-end, but the most important part is there, the nice engine without any nasty privacy violating services built in. But my first impressions with the front end are pretty good, and i'm not even a vim user.

[1] https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine