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