The-Compiler

qutebrowser, Falkon and Gnome Web aren't forks of anything, they use a well-defined and maintained API.

For qutebrowser and Falkon, that's QtWebEngine, which you could call a fork of Chromium I guess - but it's more of a stripped-down Chromium with a stable API on top and a couple of patches. QtWebEngine is maintained by multiple people employed full-time by the Qt Company: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine

For Gnome Web, that's WebKitGTK, which is an official WebKit port (i.e. part of the upstream WebKit repository maintained by Apple and others) and also has been actively maintained for the past 13 years or so.

FWIW Slack seems to work fine in surf for me. Are you sure you have an up-to-date WebKitGTK on your system? Those kinds of issues are typically fixed there, and not in surf itself. As long as the WebKit API stays backwards-compatible, there's probably not much need for surf to change (other than for new features).

There's zsurf based on QtWebEngine/Chromium too, FWIW: https://github.com/SteveDeFacto/zsurf

qutebrowser uses QtWebEngine by default, which is based on Chromium.

You can use it with QtWebKit instead, but given that's based on a 2016 WebKit with no process isolation or sandboxing, I wouldn't recommend it.

Still waiting for Servo or https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ to be usable as a library on desktop platforms. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened so far...

Yay! :)

> and the built-in adblocker of QB is unfortunately not that performant

With "performant", I assume you mean "how well it works", not "how fast it works"?

FWIW a better adblocker is in progress: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/5317

> Also, you can't use the keyboard everywhere (thanks to the modern web) Random example off the top of my head: https://questions.wizardzines.com/event-loops.html

Yay... You can always customize the hints.selectors setting to add selectors for those (for websites you use a lot).

There are also some thoughts on how to add hints to all elements with a JS click handler, but I haven't had a chance to take a closer look yet: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/4817

That seems to help, but I still don't see a difference with/without a Chrome UA.

I tried with Street View im vimb. I don't see any difference - it's slow to the point of being almost unusable, while it works fine in qutebrowser.

Nope, it's Google trying to ban "embedded browser frameworks" - see https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/5182 for details.

I always recommend setting custom user-agents for a problematic page instead of setting them globally.

For the Google issue, qutebrowser v1.9.0 does that already, see https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/5182

It isn't - in that blogpost, Google describes:

"However, one form of phishing, known as “man in the middle” (MITM), is hard to detect when an embedded browser framework (e.g., Chromium Embedded Framework - CEF) or another automation platform is being used for authentication. MITM intercepts the communications between a user and Google in real-time to gather the user’s credentials (including the second factor in some cases) and sign in."

In other words, the OAuth sign in is intended for applications which want to access the Google APIs in some way.

qutebrowser (as an application) doesn't need access to your Google Account in any way. It doesn't care about your Google authentication data, and it doesn't use Google APIs.

I often talk to people reporting a broken website in qutebrowser where it turns out to be due to a Firefox user agent.

Some examples (there are lots more via IRC/Reddit/...):

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4302 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/3822 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/1187

Note that setting that UA globally is a bad idea - it'll break stuff on various other websites. You might want to try setting it with a `https://accounts.google.com/*` URL pattern - or ideally, even only `https://accounts.google.com/signin` or so, if that works. Please let me know what works and what doesn't, as I still can't reproduce this with my own Google account.

Note that setting that UA globally is a bad idea - it'll break stuff on various other websites. You might want to try setting it with a `https://accounts.google.com/*` URL pattern - or ideally, even only `https://accounts.google.com/signin` or so, if that works. Please let me know what works and what doesn't, as I still can't reproduce this with my own Google account.

From what I've heard, setting a Chrome UA doesn't help with the Google Mail sign-in.

Could you elaborate on that? Do you mainly mean how bookmarks completion is integrated into :open?

The reason I'm asking is that there are plans for some significant changes on how bookmarks/quickmarks are stored and handled: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/3855

You can see what's probably the same issue in Firefox/Chromium as well: You can't scroll e.g. https://tract-docs.dev/docs/getting-started/ with the keyboard without first clicking into the page.

qutebrowser lead developer here :)

Basic per-domain settings (which also allow blocking/allowing Javascript for a page, though not for different origins on that page) have been around since qutebrowser v1.2.0 (March 2018).

For more sophisticated uMatrix-like blocking, work is ongoing on an extension API, but there's jmatrix which already uses that API unofficially. I plan to get back to the extension API soon, but there are some more important things to take care of first - see the current roadmap for details. Also, I expect things to go much faster soon, as I finished my studies and I'll soon be able to start working part-time on qutebrowser funded by donations (via GitHub sponsors).

Some links:

v1.2.0 release: https://lists.schokokeks.org/pipermail/qutebrowser-announce/... jmatrix: https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/jmatrix roadmap: https://lists.schokokeks.org/pipermail/qutebrowser-announce/... GitHub sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/The-Compiler/ related issues: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/30 https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/28

Not necessarily. QtWebEngine strips out a lot of code from Chromium, including anything talking to Google servers.

> Florian Bruhin (aka The Compiler)

Hi! :)

> Veed doesn't even work on my browser (qutebrowser via webengine).

FWIW it seems to work fine for me in qutebrowser.

Yup! It has various kinds of shortcuts for this kind of thing (increment/decrement number, find prev/next link, remove component from path).

If you're curious, the implementation is here: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/quteb...

There's https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/jmatrix https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/jblock and https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/jhide - not the real thing™ but probably coming close.

Supporting WebExtensions isn't possible without QtWebEngine (the library qutebrowser uses) doing so. That might happen some day, but will probably still take a while.

Looks like U2F works for most sites with Qt 5.12.4 (though I haven't tried myself yet): https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/3043#issue...

As for security, see point 8 at https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/f... for some thoughts on that.

FWIW I just use a keybinding to open mpv for Youtube. There's also https://github.com/ParticleCore/Iridium which can prevent ads (though I'm not sure if it still works, it was broken at some point).

> The only browser that I think could make me switch is qutebrowser, though the lack of an adblocker is an obstacle for me.

qutebrowser has a built-in adblocker (based on a host blacklist) which works fine for most scenarios.

There's also https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/jblock though that's not really supported until extension support is finished.

Huh, qutebrowser did? I doubt that.

qutebrowser uses QtWebEngine, which is based on Chromium/Blink - I wouldn't call that WebKit anymore ;-)

Might want to subscribe to https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/28 and https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/29 if you haven't already ;-)

(To clarify: it does have an adblocker, but it's quite basic, only based on a blacklist of hosts. You can also selectively enable JavaScript for individual domains, but not yet based on both webpage and its origin like with uMatrix)

Chromium and Firefox are kind of an exception there, as they are big enough for distributions to justify bundling the engine, and they are also the upstream projects where those engines are developed.