The browsers I use…
Most of the time I use Firefox. I’m happy Mozilla exists. I’m happy there’s an alternative to Google Chrome. I’m super concerned that they are basically being propped up by Google as a shield, and a tool. They can claim that they’re not a monopoly, and Mozilla cannot be too outspoken about them. I think Aral Balkan is right: the big companies are everywhere, even sponsoring their competittion, thus keeping them weak and malleable.
So, in light of the overwhelming support for surveillance capitalism by generally well-respected organisations that say they work to protect our human rights, privacy, and democracy, I have decided that I must be the one who’s wrong.
Aral Balkan criticising Google and Facebook and their corrupting influence
So yes, I use Firefox. I also change many of the defaults, and install a handful of extensions to make it work. There are a gazillion defaults, and they change every now and then, so this helps keep us all confused and our defences weak. I hate that. Having to install extensions is also problematic as they increase our attack surface, make us more vulnerable. How easy it must be to bully, bribe or buy the small fries extension authors. I dislike this very much.
Basically I search for telemetry*enabled and switch it all too false, because I don’t understand why we need a bewildering plethora of options when almost all people will be either “I don’t care” or “fuck this shit”. This is false choice designed to confuse the unwary, if you ask me.
My Firefox Setup page keeps growing and growing
So what else should I be using, if I can? Not any of the Firefox-derivatives, that’s for sure.
I have qutebrowser installed but hardly ever use it. The lack of a menu make it very difficult to discover; you’re immediately faced with a terrible wall.
qutebrowser is a keyboard-focused browser with a minimal GUI
I recently compiled and installed netsurf. We'll see whether that gets used more often.
Small as a mouse, fast as a cheetah and available for free. NetSurf is a multi-platform web browser for RISC OS, UNIX-like platforms (including Linux), Mac OS X, and more.
I’ve used Eww a lot; the browser inside Emacs. It’s text only, no Javascript, so you can’t use it for many links, but it definitely works well when following links from mails or social media, where you’re not sure where they’re taking you. Having a text-only browser without Javascript at your fingertips is great. And it has a reader mode integrated that I keep forgetting about because it’s already close to ideal. Use R, for “readable.”
Actually, I have started writing a little something that allows me to use Elpher for the web. Elpher is a Gopher and Gemini browser for Emacs. I mean, I’m just hooking existing stuff up: url-retrieve to fetch stuff via HTTP; HTTP header parsing using code I copied from Eww; HTML rendering using shr, the same library that Eww is using. The benefit I’m hoping to see is that it’s easier to follow HTTP links from Elpher without accidentally switching from Elpher to Eww. When that happens, things still look OK, but the keybindings are different, and you can’t go “back” to Elpher because now you have both Elpher and Eww buffers, so you have to quit or bury Eww in order to get back to Elpher. It confused me for a while.
One interesting side effect: Emacs has its own bookmarks, mostly for positions in files, but with a framework that lets us extend them to other uses. Eww has its own bookmarks. Elpher used to have its own bookmarks. But I recently managed to switch Elpher bookmarks to the Emacs bookmarks backend, so now I can visit websites using Elpher, and bookmark them, and they end up in Emacs bookmarks where I can edit and annotate them, bypassing the Eww bookmarks. It’s going to be part of the next official Elpher release, apparently. 😁
Eww is an easy choice if you use Emacs for everything
elpher-http.el adds web browsing to Elpher
Elpher: a gopher and gemini client for GNU Emacs
Fighting the urge to add Emacs bookmarks as a back-end to Eww bookmarks… Nooo!
Fighting the urge to add Emacs bookmarks as a back-end to Eww bookmarks… Nooo!
Don't fight. I would *love* to see Emacs native bookmarks in eww.
OTOH, I'm moving away from bookmarks towards using orgmode links.
-- Martin 2021-07-28 14:07 UTC
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Org Mode is eating the world!
-- Alex 2021-07-28 15:09 UTC
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I also mostly use Firefox, but I feel about it the same way that you do, I wish they were stronger in defending the Open Web and not dependent on Google. Maybe Firefox users should be encouraged to donate more to Mozilla so they can become independent, but I don’t know if they could ever match Google’s cash. If there could be an awareness of what is going on, similar to what happened at the beginning of the year with WhatsApp, leading people to embrace Signal and Threema more, that might help.
I actually never used Chrome day-to-day. I have only used it occasionally for work (webdev stuff for testing and so on). Originally this was because I was dependent on a lot of Firefox extensions that were not available for Chrome at the time, but now I still stick to Firefox for privacy reasons. Though I am depressed that sometimes sites won’t work properly unless you use Chrome. Just as I’m depressed that nowadays some sites won’t display at all unless you have JavaScript enabled.
Have you tried nyxt? I am busy slowly getting into it at the moment, I think it is similar to qutebrowser, also a keyboard-driven browser, based on GTK-webkit. I used to use Conkeror, which has been discontinued for some time now (RIP XUL) and that was really the best web browsing experience I ever had: a fully functioning keyboard-driven browser like Emacs based on Firefox.
-- kahas 2021-07-28 19:50 UTC
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Hm, nyxt rings a bell. Perhaps I installed it and forgot about it? I have to check. Thanks for the reminder.
-- Alex 2021-07-28 21:25 UTC
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I'm always surprised when people forget not only that WebKit exists, but that runs laps around everything else. People switch from Chrome to another Chromium-based browser without realising Blink is just a Google-crippled fork of WebKit! It's crazy. But luckily there are plenty of cool WebKit-backed browsers:
-- rnkn 2021-07-29 05:24 UTC
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Ah, very cool. “luakit” and “surf” are packages I can install with apt. Thanks!
Sadly, surf won't start. No desktop file installed, and when started from a terminal, errors… Luakit looks similar to qutebrowser: ‘o’ to open a new URL, ‘:’ for extended commands, with ‘TAB‘ to show completions. I was quite confused, however: ‘:tablast’ or ‘:bookmark’ both didn't do what I expected them to do. More experimenting will be required.
-- Alex 2021-07-29 07:13 UTC
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Re surf, it's surely the least user-friendly of the bunch. And if you're on Wayland I seem to recall it requiring a env variable hack to work.
Yeah both Luakit and vimb share a design approach with qutebrowser, although using WebKit vs WebEngine (Blink) will greatly improve performance.
-- rnkn 2021-07-30 09:35 UTC
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Emacs should link against libwebkit2gtk.so!
-- Martin 2021-07-31 08:16 UTC
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Today I saw falkon mentioned. It's Qt WebEngine based and I'm not a Qt user…
I ended up not installing it.
alex@melanobombus ~> sudo apt install falkon [sudo] password for alex: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following additional packages will be installed: kwayland-data kwayland-integration libdbusmenu-qt5-2 libfam0 libkf5archive5 libkf5auth-data libkf5auth5 libkf5codecs-data libkf5codecs5 libkf5config-bin libkf5config-data libkf5configcore5 libkf5configgui5 libkf5configwidgets-data libkf5configwidgets5 libkf5coreaddons-data libkf5coreaddons5 libkf5crash5 libkf5dbusaddons-bin libkf5dbusaddons-data libkf5dbusaddons5 libkf5guiaddons5 libkf5i18n-data libkf5i18n5 libkf5iconthemes-bin libkf5iconthemes-data libkf5iconthemes5 libkf5idletime5 libkf5itemviews-data libkf5itemviews5 libkf5notifications-data libkf5notifications5 libkf5service-bin libkf5service-data libkf5service5 libkf5wallet-bin libkf5wallet-data libkf5wallet5 libkf5waylandclient5 libkf5widgetsaddons-data libkf5widgetsaddons5 libkf5windowsystem-data libkf5windowsystem5 libkwalletbackend5-5 libphonon4qt5-4 libpolkit-qt5-1-1 libqt5texttospeech5 libqt5waylandclient5 libqt5waylandcompositor5 phonon4qt5 phonon4qt5-backend-vlc qtwayland5
-- Alex 2021-07-31 22:19 UTC
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I think it's worth the time to learn qutebrowser. I love it. It renders all web pages correctly (being WebEngine; I can't say the same for WebKit) and I have it highly integrated with Emacs (one key to save page as bookmark in my Org-based bookmarks). Using the keyboard for things allows me to do things that I could not do without it, because of mouse-hovering.
-- jtgd 2021-08-02 08:53 UTC
(The access token for short comments is “hello”.)