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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
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