About two years ago I switched my main browser from Qutebrowser to Firefox. I don't even remember what triggered the switch, but I was probably annoyed by some glitches around the input / edit mode handling or needed to support 4 different proxies, so Foxproxy came in handy.

Yesterday I was kindly reminded that it would be a good time to give Qutebrowser another try. I no longer need to tunnel traffic through 4 different proxies on a daily basis. My custom CSS needs are modest (mono fonts where possible) and gopass is supported well.

Sadly it's still not possible to have per Domain CSS or JavaScript settings, but I can replicate most of my user-styles.css with generous application of Greasemonkey.

So yesterday I switched back to Qutebrowser and there was almost no friction in getting my day-to-day browsing done. (Granted, I was using Tridactyl with Firefox)

https://img.bascht.com/2022-blog/01-tech/2021-01-14-qutebrowser.png

What immediately felt like a relief: The key-bindings are much more consistent than they could be with Tridactyl. That's not even Tridactyl's fault, but with Firefox locking down what Add-Ons can do, there were more road blocks, where I had to reach for the mouse. Again - that's not even a net-negative for Firefox, as it probably improved the overall browser-security in regard to Add-Ons. But I like to

  • tinker with my software

  • configure it with simple git-trackable config files

  • integrate it with other text-based utilities (think org-mode, wl-paste or my drop scripts)

it's been getting harder and harder to get Firefox to do this consistently across multiple machines.

As for me, I am now back to a simple config.py file to configure my browser and I couldn't be happier.