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by Timothee 563 days ago
I’ve used both for many years. I’ve stopped using qutebrowser because it has some limitations due to be a bit behind on the web engine, which leads to problems with some sites. I still think it’s brilliant.

I wouldn’t say they do the same thing exactly. Vimium is similar to a vim-mode in something like VS Code, while qutebrowser is more like Vim itself. The Vim “spirit” is built-in and is the expectation rather than a layer added on top. The qutebrowser UI, already minimalistic, is also very configurable and scriptable.

The flip side to me is that some of the experience will be nicer with Chrome, the same way VS Code can be nicer and easier to manage.
2 comments
The-Compiler 563 days ago
> I’ve stopped using qutebrowser because it has some limitations due to be a bit behind on the web engine, which leads to problems with some sites.

Assuming you're on Linux, that's usually more of a problem with Linux distributions being behind on QtWebEngine. Though yeah, sometimes things are tight with QtWebEngine only updating their Chromium baseline once every 6 months. I try to ship workarounds (in the form of polyfills) with qutebrowser when I know about breakage, but usually for me things run smoothly.

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Timothee 563 days ago
No, I’m on macOS. I think my main issue was with videos that didn’t always play correctly. Can’t remember exactly but I think either on Reddit or Twitter, it was just not reliable.
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The-Compiler 563 days ago
Ah, I see. That's not due to the Chromium version though, it's because the Chromium that comes with Qt releases (which is what's shipped in qutebrowser releases) is built without proprietary codec support.

Unfortunately, support for proprietary codecs like MP4 and such requires building Qt from sources, and would also require me to acquire licenses for them all (I believe they're free until a certain number of distributions, but also with all the indirect ways you can get qutebrowser, I can hardly even provide that information).

This isn't an issue on Linux, because those licenses have some sort of exception in the sense of "if shipped with an operating system or its packages".

Homebrew seems to build its Qt packages against system ffmpeg with proprietary codecs enabled, and there's an issue open which would at least allow you to build a custom build against that: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4127

Maybe I should look into whether I'd be allowed to redistribute such builds (or what kind of paperwork I'd need to do for it). Unfortunately there's a lot on my plate, and macOS/Windows are admittedly somewhat second-class citizens as I don't use those myself.

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porphyra 563 days ago
Configuring the qutebrowser UI is a major reason I used qutebrowser for some years. I love ricing my system and saving screen real estate with a minimal UI bloat is nice.
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