pages/blog/mnml-browsing.md (view raw)
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--- template: title: Vimb: my Firefox replacement subtitle: Web browsing, suckless style date: 2020-01-16 slug: mnml-browsing --- After having recently installed [KISS](https://getkiss.org), 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 [firefox-bin](https://github.com/kisslinux/repo/tree/master/extra/firefox-bin) package; I decided to get rid of that slow mess anyway. ## Enter vimb [vimb](https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/) is a browser based on [webkit2gtk](https://webkitgtk.org/), 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 [tabbed](https://tools.suckless.org/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 -- voilà! 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. [wyebadblock](https://github.com/jun7/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:  |