pages/txt/mnml-browsing.txt (view raw)
1 16 January, 2020
2
3Vimb: my Firefox replacement
4
5Web browsing, suckless style
6
7 After having recently installed [1]KISS, and building Firefox from
8 source, I was exposed to the true monstrosity that Firefox -- and web
9 browsers in general---is. It took all of 9 hours to build the
10 dependencies and then Firefox itself.
11
12 Sure, KISS now ships Firefox binaries in the [2]firefox-bin package; I
13 decided to get rid of that slow mess anyway.
14
15Enter vimb
16
17 [3]vimb is a browser based on [4]webkit2gtk, with a Vim-like interface.
18 webkit2gtk builds in less than a minute -- it blows Firefox out of the
19 water, on that front.
20
21 There isn't much of a UI to it -- if you've used Vimperator/Pentadactyl
22 (Firefox plugins), vimb should look familiar to you. It can be
23 configured via a config.h or a text based config file at
24 ~/.config/vimb/config. Each "tab" opens a new instance of vimb, in a
25 new window but this can get messy really fast if you have a lot of tabs
26 open.
27
28Enter tabbed
29
30 [5]tabbed is a tool to embed X apps which support xembed into a tabbed
31 UI. This can be used in conjunction with vimb, like so:
32tabbed vimb -e
33
34 Where the -e flag is populated with the XID, by tabbed. Configuring
35 Firefox-esque keybinds in tabbed's config.h is relatively easy. Once
36 that's done -- voil�! A fairly sane, Vim-like browsing experience
37 that's faster and has a smaller footprint than Firefox.
38
39Ad blocking
40
41 Ad blocking support isn't built-in and there is no plugin system
42 available. There are two options for ad blocking:
43 1. [6]wyebadblock
44 2. /etc/hosts
45
46Caveats
47
48 Some websites tend to not work because they detect vimb as an older
49 version of Safari (same web engine). This is a minor inconvenience, and
50 not a dealbreaker for me. I also cannot login to Google's services for
51 some reason, which is mildly annoying, but it's good in a way -- I am
52 now further incentivised to dispose of my Google account.
53
54 And here's the screenshot y'all were waiting for:
55
56 vimb
57
58References
59
60 1. https://getkiss.org/
61 2. https://github.com/kisslinux/repo/tree/master/extra/firefox-bin
62 3. https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/
63 4. https://webkitgtk.org/
64 5. https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/
65 6. https://github.com/jun7/wyebadblock