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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Another alternative that I use as a daily browser is qutebrowser. Basically the same idea, but with Python instead. Also comes with nice vim-bindings for navigation: https://qutebrowser.org/

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Qutebrowser is nice, but it uses the same webengine (QtWebengine) that chrome uses. This is a concern for some

I don't have chrome, but I have chromium, and I don't see its package depend on the qt5-webengine package that qutebrowser depends on. Doesn't chrome/chromium use their own web engine called Blink[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)

I think their comment was either confusing or they misconstrued something. QtWebEngine uses code from Chromium [1], not the other way around.

[1]: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine

>This is a concern for some

I don't think so. Why would it be a concern? It's not like the web rendering engine will "phone home" under your nose or something...

I don't use any of these alternative browsers because I don't want to increase the Blink/Webkit marketshare even further.

This ^

Concern in the sense that some people don't want to be using the same kit as other browsers do. (E.g. this guy https://reddit.com/r/qutebrowser/comments/a4uk9r/use_of_webk...)

I used it for a while. It's fantastic browser. Unfortunately modern web is so broken that using browser without real adblocker (uBlock) is basically impossible so I had to switch to Firefox.

no perf issues ? laggy UX or else ?

Fastest browser I've used so far (Went from IE > Firefox > Chrome > Firefox). No problems with UX either, I'm using the vertical tabs, the rest of the browser barely have any UX except for keyboard shortcuts and commands.

These browsers are plenty fast since they are mostly just using lua/python for the UI and webkit/chromium for the browser component. The things that keep me coming back to luakit and qutebrowser are:

1. Way better vim binding support. Especially that the vim mode doesn't break when the extensions aren't loaded (ie a page fails to load or dev tools are focused or on settings pages)

2. Way more scriptable and customizable.(luakit is much more mature in this regard)

> Way more scriptable and customizable

Love to hear more about exactly what is more scriptable and customizable.

The user scripts (not to be confused with Greasemonkey-like userscripts) gives me all the scriptability I need. What could more could I do with luakit?

A quick glance at the luakit and qutebowser documentation should give an idea. The difference can be summed up by pointing out that the python and lua code you write for these browsers is trusted and can even modify the UI of the browser. For example in luakit you can add new “chrome pages” so if you don’t like the bookmark manager for example you could write your own.

User scripts only run when a page is loaded afaik.

I was thinking about specifically the different of luakit and qutebrowser, not luakit/qutebrowser and other browsers. As mentioned above, I already use qutebrowser daily.

User scripts (again, in the qutebrowser sense, not greasemonkey as it seems you're thinking about) is launched when the user wants them to launch. See more details here: https://qutebrowser.org/doc/userscripts.html

gonna give it a go

ps: first start feels great

Quite the opposite, that's the reason I used qutebrowser.

Plus it was really easy to write simple quick scripts for it without the overhead of web extensions.

The main reason to use it is the Vim support is rock solid, instead of a hack on top of existing behaviour.

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