Comment by The-Compiler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by The-Compiler | Hacker News Reader

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> The latter often leads to the familiar dependency hell when trying to install or upgrade the program.

Can you elaborate?

> I have frequent crashes, it’s slow at rendering pages, it uses more memory than (for example) chromium and seems to leak memory; any kind of CSS animation causes the CPU to have a major workout.

Those are indeed most likely caused by the underlying QtWebEngine in some way - though there also have been some performance improvements in qutebrowser itself, with some more planned: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues?q=is%3Aope...

> After one upgrade most video stopped working.

If you installed qutebrowser outside of Ubuntu's packages, that might be caused by the prebuilt Qt lacking proprietary codec support.

Despite that, it's what I'd recommend if you're on a Ubuntu LTS with often grossly outdated Qt versions: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/i...

> I never cared about the ad blocker, as I use a hosts file for that. Why doesn’t everyone? It seems to be a better solution.

That's essentially what qutebrowser did before this release as well - but many ads and trackers are served from the visited page directly rather than a third-party host.

“Can you elaborate?”

First, thanks for your work on Qutebrowser. I’m sure it’s exhausting in many ways, and I know it’s basically a hobby. So despite my complaints I’m impressed and I love the concept. And I’ve noticed you are consistently responsive to users, despite this not being a job.

Pip installing QB usually leads to errors about missing or wrong Python QT libraries, and attempts to install those lead to other errors. I don’t expect you to deal with these problems; it’s what I’ve come to expect with large Python programs. Using a virtual env. did not solve the issues for me.

EDIT: or it will install, but then when I run it, I get an error about something missing or being the wrong version.

The nonworking video, I’m sure, is due to missing codecs.

“many ads and trackers are served from the visited page directly”

True, but the hosts file seems to catch most everything.

> despite this not being a job

Yes and no - I'm only employed for 2 days a week, and earn enough in (recurring) donation income for this to be considered a part-time job. I also do some training/consulting around Python/pytest with my company (Bruhin Software), but that's usually only a couple of days per month.

> Using a virtual env. did not solve the issues for me.

That's weird, I'm not aware of any issues like that which wouldn't be resolved by using a virtualenv. You might want to try using qutebrowser's mkvenv.py which takes care of everything (or at least tries to):

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/i...

“earn enough in (recurring) donation income for this to be considered a part-time job”

Glad to hear that!

“I'm not aware of any issues like that which wouldn't be resolved by using a virtualenv.”

To be more accurate, if I recall correctly, I think it did resolve the dependency issues, but the result was that the version of QB installed this way was crashy, or there was some other problem. Sorry, I didn’t take notes. I haven’t tried mkvenv.py, thanks for suggesting that.

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