Comment by The-Compiler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by The-Compiler | Hacker News Reader

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> I hate that it's based on Chromium though

There aren't really many alternatives. The main one is WebKitGTK, but that comes with its own set of issues (mostly performance/compatibility). You can use qutebrowser with QtWebKit as well, but I wouldn't recommend it - it's based on a 2018 WebKit with many known security issues: https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/releases

I had hoped for Servo to fill that gap at some point, but so far that hasn't happened yet: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/27579

Another possibility is for Geckoview to be ported to Desktop platforms some day: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ - something the people behind Tridactyl would like to happen: https://tridactyl.xyz/ideas/#port-geckoview-to-x86_64

> and Qutebrowser privacy related settings also seem quite limited compared to Firefox... (and even compared to Chromium.)

Can you be more specific? Pretty much anything that's possible to expose (either via a QtWebEngine API or via Chromium commandline arguments) is exposed. Certain things (like deleting cookies belonging to a tab when it's closed) just aren't possible without implementing them in QtWebEngine first unfortunately.

FWIW there's an overview here: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4045

Thanks for your reply, the basic things i was missing at a first glance:

- Could not find a way/command to simply clear ALL the cache (cookies, cached images and files, Database storage, etc.)

- The ultimate goal would be some way to replace the functionality of "Temporary Containers" or alternatively "Cookie Autodelete" (you keep all the history, but everything else is in Incognito mode except for whitelisted sites.)

- Can't disable WebRTC (= unique device id can always be tracked)

I can understand the choice for Chromium btw. Although i can't bring myself to using/supporting Google's monopoly... so i'll stick to Firefox as my main browser.

Great project, keep it up :)

> Could not find a way/command to simply clear ALL the cache (cookies, cached images and files, Database storage, etc.)

That one is indeed because most of those things are opaque to qutebrowser. They're handled by the underlying QtWebEngine/Chromium, and only for a few of those things there's a way for qutebrowser to delete them. There's an issue about it here: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/58 - but many things probably can't be done, or only in a hackish way (e.g. by qutebrowser reading/manipulating those internal Chromium files, before it starts up fully).

You can however remove ~/.cache/qutebrowser and ~/.local/share/qutebrowser/webengine/ manually.

> The ultimate goal would be some way to replace the functionality of "Temporary Containers" or alternatively "Cookie Autodelete" (you keep all the history, but everything else is in Incognito mode except for whitelisted sites.)

Via qutebrowser's `--temp-basedir` (or `--basedir`) flag, you can already start an isolated instance - but indeed the history won't be shared with the main instance (and neither will e.g. the config, but there's the --config-py flag).

There are also some "profile managers" which are based on the `--basedir` flag: https://www.reddit.com/r/qutebrowser/comments/l6zj0z/compari...

Finally, I'd indeed like to have a container-like feature integrated into qutebrowser itself in some way: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4102 - automatically switching containers based on the URL unfortunately won't be possible, but I think even just launching a new window with a different storage path (i.e. profile) would provide a lot of value.

> Can't disable WebRTC (= unique device id can always be tracked)

I think to fully disable it, you'll need to rebuild QtWebEngine. As far as I know, this is a Chromium limitation. Can you elaborate on "unique device id" though? I'm only aware of WebRTC leaking internal IPs, which can be prevented via the `content.webrtc_ip_handling_policy` setting.

> Great project, keep it up :)

Thanks for all the feedback, I really appreciate it!

I will have a look at the profile managers, that might be quite useful for now, thanks for the tips;

As for the "unique device id", you can check it here where they also describe how to turn it off in Firefox: https://browserleaks.com/webrtc

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