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Comment by airtag | Hacker News Reader

There's also a free, open source vim style browser called Qutebrowser which you can control like Vim if that's your thing. It works well, also with complicated web sites.

https://qutebrowser.org/

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I have been using qutebrowser for some time now and it's pretty nice if you can accept having a browser without UBlock Origin and other extensions ranging from nice-to-have to obligatory. The main advantage and the reason and I can't get myself to switch to Firefox is that it's vim-UX is just flawless. It works amazingly well and is just magnitudes better than any Firefox or Chrome extension that adds vim-UX on top since it's built into the browser natively in qutebrowser.

Maybe I'll switch away some time in the future, but for now the flawless vim-UX, its customizability and my many scripts and custom bindings I've written for it keep my locked in the qutebrowser garden, haha!

+1 my thoughts exactly. It would be so nice if Firefox allowed tridactyl full keyboard control. With qutebrowser, having a proper control mode and an insert mode that work everywhere makes it so much easier to navigate.

Mozilla said they were happy to do that five years ago if we wrote the API. We started work on it here [1] but lost interest because there have always been more urgent things to do (and for me, the ctrl+comma escape hatch that gets you back to Tridactyl from anywhere in the browser is good enough).

I think honestly most of the work in getting such an API merged would be political since most of the people who approved it are no longer at Mozilla.

If anyone wants to pick it up I would be delighted to help.

[1]: https://github.com/tridactyl/keyboard-api

Qutebrowser seem to have some built-in support for adblocking, have you used that? I'm curious how it works.

Tried it before, long long time ago, but found it to complex. But now after using Vimium for a while Qutebrowser actually seems very intuitive and not hard at all.

qutebrowser has support for host-based blocking, which is better than nothing but a far cry from element blocking like UBlock Origin does. For me, qutebrowser's ad-blocking is pretty hit-and-miss, which is why I'm longing for UBlock Origin haha.

Origin is hard to beat and unfortunately a must have nowadays.

Although I must admit for a longer while I've been ignoring sites that are annoying or unusable without a blocker and it made my day much calmer. I stopped even clicking links on most "news" sites that are just borderline clickbaits.

> pretty nice if you can accept having a browser without UBlock Origin

Just for potential readers who might not be aware: qutebrowser ships with its own inbuild adblocker though, so you're entirely left adrift in the ad-trashpile that is the Web today. Qutebrowser isn't my daily driver (mainly because I found it a pain to configure), but from my limited experience, the adblocking works pretty well.

> so you're entirely left adrift

so you're *not* entirely left adrift

I love qutebrowser and use it daily (and donate to the compiler), mostly on Linux but also on Windows.

Here are some of my headaches that force me to use Chrome/Firefox anyway sometimes, if anyone has answers to these I am very interested to hear them.

* Can't save passwords / autofill (for accounts I don't particularly care about)

* UI scaling in Windows (for high-res screens) is bad. The web page contents do not scale automatically.

* Does not resolve Teams "secure links" (workaround is to right click teams links instead and copy them, then paste in qutebrowser)

* Twitter videos don't work

* On linux (somehow this works on windows), "accept all cookies" sometimes does not get rid of that prompt. Stack overflow is an example where this happens. Another example is redhat where the prompt does not load for a while [0]

* Clicking something that spawns a box where text can be inserted does not bring me into insert mode. Example [1] (the searchglass). This causes me to close the tab by mistake sometimes by typing 'd'.

[0]: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... [1]: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/templates/web-design...

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