# Is there any usable browser left on FreeBSD?



## sko (Apr 18, 2020)

Warning: this could become a bit of a rant...

I've been holding on to 11.3-RELEASE with an outdated FF-ESR on my desktops and laptop for quite some time, because of some essential plugins I've been using that don't have any proper replacement in quantum or chrome based browsers.
Now I updated my desktop at home to 12.1 and tried to get iridium and firefox to an halfway usable state for about 2 weeks but it always ends in complete rage due to browsers getting more and more locked down, worse to work with and essentially nearly useless for efficient workflows...

There are mainly 3 things I want on a browser:
1. vim keybindings
  I've been using pentadactyl for years and use vim keybindings everywhere possible (window manager, terminal emulator, tmux etc pp).
2. tree-style-tabs (with scroll-wheel tab switching)
  During the day I often open 50-100 tabs over ~2-3 windows, so this is essential for organization and with the widescreen monitors of today it is kind of dumb to put everything on top if you have plenty of space on the side(s)...
3. trimmed-down GUI with stuff removed I don't need/want and only waste space (e.g. the url-bar)

(and maybe 4: a plugin for the pass/password-store password-manager)

Regarding 1.
I've tried tridactyl and cVim, but both are annoyingly buggy. E.G. both fail to read/write an rc-file, they often stop working until I open a new tab and click into it several times. They don't work in all types of tabs (e.g. error sites, because some brain-dead dev at chrome decided they should be hidden from extensions and FF adapted this BS) and cVim seems to randomly forget/reset settings I've made (and can't save/load the rc-file because thats broken...). pentadactyl worked perfectly YEARS ago - now all we have is some tranwrecks that couldn't get even close in usability...

2.
For chrome-based browsers there seems to be only Sidewise as a viable alternative to the old tree-style-tabs. But because it is a separate window it is hugely annoying to use in combination with cVim as you always have to re-focus to the browser window e.g. if you scrolled through the tabs or closed a tab. Also because of this scrolling through tabs is broken as the Sidewise window first has to be in focus (=at least 1 step of the scroll wheel is not registered by Sidewise). If you switch tabs with keybindings the Sidewise window *sometimes* takes focus and cVim no longer works until you re-focus one of the browser windows and more annoyingly: if you close a tab via keybinding the Sidewise window is in focus. Also there is only one Sidebar for all windows instead of one in each window, which would be much more intuitive, especially with multiple monitors and desktops.
For Firefox the new tree-style-tab extension is a bad joke compared to the old one - there's a HUGE title/dropdown menu button you can't get rid of. The sorting/cascading is often unpredictable and counter-intuitive (manually opening a new tab sometimes puts it on the highest level, sometimes to a sublevel of the last tab) and if you hide the top tab bar, the tree-style sidebar is broken. And it also has the behavior of a separate window in that it steals the focus from tridactyl if you move the mouse over the sidebar.

3.
I don't need an URL or search bar (see 1.) or a tab bar (see 2.) yet it seems with current firefox or chrome-based browsers it isn't possible to hide/remove them without breaking the whole browser - e.g. firefox plain out refuses to load anything if the URL bar is hidden. With the URL-bar present, when you open a new tab often the URL bar steals the keyboard focus and you can't use the tridactyl bindings until you klick somewhere outside the url-bar (esc for some stupid reason won't let you out of the url-bar). There's also no way to get back the small status bar at the bottom where I usually keep all plugin-icons - this would be ok if you could trim down one of the top bars to only contain these icons, but you can't rearrange everything by drag/drop as it used to be with older (non-quantum) versions of firefox. So you're not only forced to keep useless cruft in the GUI but it also gets in your way as often and as annoyingly as it can.


Most if not all of these issues are well known to the devs of the named extensions, but they are mostly victims of the browser projects that seem to work more and more against plugin devs (no stable interfaces, no information about what gets changed or deprecated etc. pp.). The bugreports some of the plugin devs or their users filed with chrome or firefox usually get shut down with the attitude of "we don't want users to modify their browsers, we don't support any customization -> WONTFIX" (for the URL-bar issue on firefox it was even more aggressively worded by a dev...). Even pull requests that would fix or restore previous behavior are rejected with the same blunt arguments. And with both of the remaining browser projects trying to lock down everything and forcing you to use what they think is "usable" or "best" I assume it only gets worse...

With projects like Waterfox gone from the ports/packages, it seems there is already no usable browser left on FreeBSD. Trying to build waterfox from sources is a dependency hell and I definitely have better things to do than opening this can of worms. So currently I'm trying to get Waterfox classic working via wine (the linux version needs crap like pulseaudio I _definately_ don't want to get back on my system...) as a last resort to which I'll have to hold on until end of times if no other viable alternative turns up...

Am I the only one that refuses to accept the way browsers are heading? Any previous pentadactyl users here that can share what they use as a (usable!) replacement today?


----------



## Stazer (Apr 18, 2020)

Although it still does not support tree tabs (nevertheless, someone is working on this feature), maybe www/qutebrowser is something for you.


----------



## MarcoB (Apr 18, 2020)

I'm maintaining www/luakit and www/luakit-devel. Imo the only gui browser that not uses a ridiculous amount of resources. It  uses www/webkit2-gtk3 as backend.


----------



## Hakaba (Apr 18, 2020)

I use www/surf (with x11/dmenu).


----------



## MarcoB (Apr 18, 2020)

True, I forgot www/surf. Same engine though.


----------



## George (Apr 18, 2020)

The title is misleading, as there are many usable browsers..


----------



## mickey (Apr 18, 2020)

sko said:


> Am I the only one that refuses to accept the way browsers are heading?


You are not alone, although my personal browsing requirements are quite different. Firefox 75 with it's new megabar and the removed functionality to configure it to have single click position the cursor instead of selecting all text, just brought me to the point where i've finally had it. That was probably just the last drop in a long list of poor design decisions, added bloat and useless features nobody ever asked for. Previously it had been possible to deal with such unwanted features for the most part, by tuning some (mostly hidden) configuration settings, which has caused my user.js file to steadily grow over the past years. Just this time functionality that was actually useful has been removed and so far Mozilla's attitude towards this seems to be "WONTFIX" paired with poor excuses like other browser would behave the same way. As a consequence today I downgraded all my Firefox installations to Firefox 68.7.0-esr to regain a somewhat more usable browser and give me some time to evaluate other options. Unfortunately I cannot say that I have found any viable alternative yet.


----------

