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Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

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Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#41

Post by weinzierl »

omeid2 wrote: post #37
weinzierl wrote: post #36

I wish there was a browser as secure as Chrome but hackable without restrictions. I do not think this is a contradiction, at least not from a technical perspective. I am willing to take the responsibility for all actions and modifications I do to my own browser but I need it be secure against all influences out of my control. And I need it come with secure defaults. To be competitive it needs to come without awkward…

https://firefox.com

Not hackable enough. Just see the comments here about how extensions like Vimium are limited why projects like the mentioned qutebrowser and Luakit exist.

Also, even if Firefox retains some of its hackability it can be gone tomorrow. I say this with a heavy heart, I personally lost trust in Mozilla as reasonable stewards of Firefox and allies that would protect Firefox users' freedoms. I don't want to drive this thread into that direction, if you're interested there should be enough in my comment history to give you an idea about the reasons and why I think like that.

Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#45

Post by the_absurdist »

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Surfingkeys https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys. I switched over from Vimium a couple years ago. I think its more performant than Vimium and also allows you quite a bit more flexibility in your configuration.

I prefer and recommend browser add-ons over Nyxt. You'll get more compatibility by being able to use Chrome/Firefox. You'll also have a much higher chance of being able to use the same environment at work - since you can typically still install browser add-ons in developer mode even if you aren't able to get rights to install apps.

Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#46

Post by slightwinder »

weinzierl wrote: post #36

I wish there was a browser as secure as Chrome but hackable without restrictions. I do not think this is a contradiction, at least not from a technical perspective. I am willing to take the responsibility for all actions and modifications I do to my own browser but I need it be secure against all influences out of my control. And I need it come with secure defaults. To be competitive it needs to come without awkward…

Maybe someone should fork Firefox and make it hackable again. Probably not even that hard. Fix the keybindings, add some first-class-support for userscripting, local extensions and interaction with local system.. All those forks are just focused on adding more privacy or new addons at the moment.

Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#48

Post by The-Compiler »

weinzierl wrote: post #36

I wish there was a browser as secure as Chrome but hackable without restrictions. I do not think this is a contradiction, at least not from a technical perspective. I am willing to take the responsibility for all actions and modifications I do to my own browser but I need it be secure against all influences out of my control. And I need it come with secure defaults. To be competitive it needs to come without awkward…

The majority of security issues in browsers is in the more low-level components (rendering engine, sandbox, network stack, JS runtime, etc.). None of those small browsers implement any of that themselves, they either build on top of WebKit (e.g. via WebKitGTK, like Luakit), or on top of Chromium (via QtWebEngine like qutebrowser, or via Electron like Vieb).

So you'll mostly need to focus on keeping that up to date. Some distributions (Debian/Ubuntu for example) unfortunately do a bad job at that, but you can also quite easily install them as a binary from upstream.

You still will lag behind a bit on security fixes compared to Chromium directly, that's true. In the case of QtWebEngine, they backport security fixes to the next patch release, and I know of some distributions (I think it was Fedora?) that continuously backport those before Qt releases.

That leaves you with any security issue that's e.g. in the UI, or anything that's in the browser code itself.

For the former, I believe browsers aimed at more technical users can select different tradeoffs that make things more secure (e.g. qutebrowser always shows the punycode-encoded version of a URL if there's non-ASCII in it, while big browsers try to detect whether there are any confusables in it and only show it then - yet new ones are added every once in a while).

For the latter, qutebrowser has had three security bugs in almost 11 years.

Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#49

Post by The-Compiler »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #13
mikae1 wrote: post #11

I'm sorry but this is near unusable since the death of XUL and introduction of WebExtensions. I was a truly avid user of VimFX which did the same thing. Vimium these days does not work when a page hasn't finished loading and it doesn't work on blank pages (about:blank) or any other "system page" (like the preferences or addons). The "o" key can no longer highlight the address bar but brings up a non-native address ba…

Have you heard about qutebrowser, Luakit, and Nyxt? I like qb the most, as it's fairly stable and fully-featured. It offers full keyboard control, and many cool features like bindings for host-granular permissions for js and images, and is also scriptable. Built-in decent adblocker. The main annoyance about it for me is it doesn't come with DRM, but it could also be seen as a feature, because it saves me a lot of tim…

DRM should work just fine via Widevine if you have a Qt build with proprietary codec support, and you have an appropriate version of Widevine available.

See https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtwebengine-features.html#html5-drm

Re: Vimium – The Hacker's Browser

#50

Post by mariusor »

kataklasm wrote: post #40
hansvm wrote: post #22

If you like vimium, or the idea of it, consider giving qutebrowser a spin. Chrome hampers extensions in a variety of ways (e.g., not being able to use vimium bindings on any "internal" pages), and a fully fledged browser makes the experience much more cohesive.

i used QB for years and loved it but eventually i couldn't stand not having uBlock Origin anymore.. shame there's not a good adblocker for QB

I'm pretty sure they have an adblocker in Qutebrowser. It might need some additional dependencies installed.
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