Uzbl: a browser that adheres to the Unix philosophy | Hacker News Reader

Uzbl: a browser that adheres to the Unix philosophy

tuxtraining.com

74 points3ds32 comments

I use this browser. It's put together mainly by a bunch of Arch Linux users. It's little more than a thin wrapper around webkit providing pipes and things. It requires a lot of work to configure, (unless you copy the default) but it's very lightweight and integrates with some systems and styles of work better.

Edit: : A few more thoughts,

If you like the stuff that the suckless people (http://suckless.org/) put out, you will like uzbl. Otherwise it might be a bit of a culture shock. I still haven't been able to let completely go of firefox yet.

I've been planning on using this for a while now.. one day I'll get around to it. I feel Arch + Musca + Uzbl would make a great match for a simple, minimal system. Musca and Uzbl are both externally scriptible, so I can set up a nice and easy system for myself :-P

I don't want to install just to check this point - from the keybinding info it appears you can do a google search but you can't simply enter a url?? Is that right or did I miss something.

There are no keybinding by default. You have to bind them all yourself using the config file. The example config shipped with it contains usable defaults though.

  o<space><url><enter>

will do what you are expecting.

Just noticed that there've already been interesting discussions about Uzbl on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626281

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578618

What I wonder the most about is why they don't try to bring a command line interface to firefox, kind of like how you can call safari and its content from applescript.

I think firefox can already be used with keyboard shortcuts only and they have a hard time getting their browser to be half as fast.

What configurability is concerned, I think that mozillas choice of saving all the user configs etc in a sqlite database is easy enough to access by script.

Still interesting and probably good fun to fool around with!

>> What I wonder the most about is why they don't try to bring a command line interface to firefox

See http://labs.mozilla.com/ubiquity/

yes that is really cool too but no, i meant an actual shell interface to communicate with the browser

Something like this: http://wiki.github.com/bard/mozrepl ?

or like this: http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/ (works fine with "minimalist" browsers)

Yes! That is the most amazing thing I hadn't known I wanted to have :D It takes greasemonkey and jetpack to a whole nother level. Awesome awesome awesome! If I didn't have a very important test tomorrow I know I'd spend hours messing with firefox till nothing was left.

It's worth mentioning conkeror as well -- it's basically Firefox with emacs keybindings. You can use the mouse if you want (as training wheels) and a lot of FF plugins still work.

Moreover, the .conkerorrc is in javascript rather than emacs lisp. Very cool.

Just downloaded this and gave it for a whirl. Running Ubuntu (Jaunty), it definitely felt buggy. (Which is ok, considering it's stage in development)

For starters, the window maximized height-wise past my screen and I couldn't resize it so I had trouble seeing everything (all I did was copy the default config)

Additionally, loading up YouTube.com in it made it grind to a crawl. Video loaded, but the front page took a good 10 second pause before it was fully loaded.

I like the idea though and I plan to tinker with it more in hopes that it is more ... uzbl :)

The chief performance issue is that the default cookies handler has to spin off a new process for every cookies handled and that can make things really slow. That might be the problem you are having now. There are better scripts available, but I can't tell you much about configuring them.

> the default cookies handler has to spin off a new process for every cookies handled

What? Why?

The default handler is a python script. Part of the design philosophy is to keep it separate from the browser itself.

There is an alternative: http://www.uzbl.org/news.php?id=14

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried your below link on using cookie_daemon.py and it does indeed speed it up, especially on sites like YouTube (which I'm guessing is creating a lot of cookies on many of its pages) but unfortunately it's still not too speedy.

To be honest though I love the way you use it. A minimal browser with navigation mostly tied to the keyboard is awesome.

I am running it now (just got it through arch linux package management), and it has made a good first impression. I liked the transparency of all settings within the config file, customizable keybindings, ect. The defaults seem pretty usable; probably the most apparent problem that I can see is its speed -- for instance, loading hulu took quite some time.

Here I am thinking that it's a required nowadays that browsers are huge, hulking monsters because of the multitude of things that need to be parsed and rendered on a web page. A minimal and unix-y browser sounds wonderful.

I've been enjoying Arora lately because of how small and lightweight it is, it runs blazingly fast on my old 64mb/333mhz: http://code.google.com/p/arora/

How does Uzbl match up to it in terms of memory usage? I'm (probably wrongfully) assuming it runs slowly because it's written in python.

Uzbl is actually written in C. Many of it's companion scripts (for cookies, etc...) are written in python however and can be slow.

True, however the scripts aren't compulsory - you can have uzbl call anything in response to actions, so you could call scripts in python, bash, whatever - or other native compiled apps, or tool your own stuff in assembler if you like - it's agnostic about the external apps it uses.

Well they are both using WebKit, the GTK port and for Arora the Qt port. They are probably not too far apart in memory.

P.S. How is the startup time for Arora on a 333Mhz machine? I worked hard to make it as quick as possible especially when you set it to open with a blank window.

It starts up about as fast as IE6 does. I'm guessing two or three seconds.

Because of Arora, that computer is actually usable now. Thanks for the great browser!

Unix philosophy is great for some things, not so great for others. C'mon, handle my bookmarks through an external script? No, thank you. I'll keep with Chrome/Firefox/Safari.

Isn't XULRunner bit like this

> letter-spacing: -1px;

Please don't do this for copy.

yeah, that was horrible. I actually went into firebug and changed the class so that i could read it.

awesome What about flash?

Works fine if you have the right plugins.

Warning: Doesn't work on Windows yet.

Seriously? "Uzbl - a browser that adheres to the Unix philosophy." You expect this to work on Windows?

Yes of course, its written in Python. I hope with a few tweaking, it might be able to start; I haven't looked at the code though.

BTW: It is not written in python. The core is C. The outer control systems (like cookies) are written in python.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com