💾 Archived View for jay.scot › rants › 003.gmi captured on 2021-12-17 at 13:26:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
For those preferring browsers with a minimal GUI and vim-like keyboard controls, Qutebrowser is a fantastic choice. The project can be compared to Firefox add-ons like Vim Vixen but with a smoother and more refined user interface, backed by an active creator. With that being said here comes the but.
And it's a big BUT for me, I no longer use Qutebrowser due to lack of privacy options compared to the likes of Firefox with add-ons. Does Qutebrowser have any choices at all for privacy? It sure does, BUT for the requirements of today's modern web it's just not enough to cut it. This is a list of things that you can do:
Although the problem is not a poor list of choices, each of these choices has very limited scope. For example, the ad blocker is a primitive host based list from a flat file. You're going to get video ads and page elements still showing. It just doesn't compare to add-ons like uBlock Origin, where all ads traces are just erased. Setting cookies to deny all the time often contributes to a poor user experience.
As an example, I will be constantly be asked to fill in CATCHPA's for every site sitting behind CloudFlare. However, I can install a cookie cleaner on Firefox that manages cookies on a per site basis, deletes them as soon as you navigate off the site, close a tab etc.
I also discovered that Qutebrowser does not function as intended with the option to hide the referrer header. This is currently an upstream issue with the engine Qutebrowser uses, QtWebEngine. In the hopes that this gets resolved, I have opened a bug report directly with the project.
Using the EFF's browser fingerprinting tools might show you as rather unique compared to Firefox with the privacytools.io recommended addons. In order to randomise the User Agent and HTTP Accept headers, I also tried to write a Python script to do this in Qutebrowser. Although the finger printing was improved, it was just not as good as using Firefox. Once the Qutebrowser feature list has plugin support, I would definitely switch back to Qutebrowser once it has been implemented, but unfortunately Firefox and addons are the way for me.
https://github.com/ueokande/vim-vixen