16 January, 2020

Vimb: my Firefox replacement

Web browsing, suckless style

   After having recently installed [1]KISS, and building Firefox from
   source, I was exposed to the true monstrosity that Firefox -- and web
   browsers in general---is. It took all of 9 hours to build the
   dependencies and then Firefox itself.

   Sure, KISS now ships Firefox binaries in the [2]firefox-bin package; I
   decided to get rid of that slow mess anyway.

Enter vimb

   [3]vimb is a browser based on [4]webkit2gtk, with a Vim-like interface.
   webkit2gtk builds in less than a minute -- it blows Firefox out of the
   water, on that front.

   There isn't much of a UI to it -- if you've used Vimperator/Pentadactyl
   (Firefox plugins), vimb should look familiar to you. It can be
   configured via a config.h or a text based config file at
   ~/.config/vimb/config. Each "tab" opens a new instance of vimb, in a
   new window but this can get messy really fast if you have a lot of tabs
   open.

Enter tabbed

   [5]tabbed is a tool to embed X apps which support xembed into a tabbed
   UI. This can be used in conjunction with vimb, like so:
tabbed vimb -e

   Where the -e flag is populated with the XID, by tabbed. Configuring
   Firefox-esque keybinds in tabbed's config.h is relatively easy. Once
   that's done -- voilą! A fairly sane, Vim-like browsing experience
   that's faster and has a smaller footprint than Firefox.

Ad blocking

   Ad blocking support isn't built-in and there is no plugin system
   available. There are two options for ad blocking:
    1. [6]wyebadblock
    2. /etc/hosts

Caveats

   Some websites tend to not work because they detect vimb as an older
   version of Safari (same web engine). This is a minor inconvenience, and
   not a dealbreaker for me. I also cannot login to Google's services for
   some reason, which is mildly annoying, but it's good in a way -- I am
   now further incentivised to dispose of my Google account.

   And here's the screenshot y'all were waiting for:

   vimb

References

   1. https://getkiss.org/
   2. https://github.com/kisslinux/repo/tree/master/extra/firefox-bin
   3. https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/
   4. https://webkitgtk.org/
   5. https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/
   6. https://github.com/jun7/wyebadblock