2009-10-17

Browser Wars, Part 1 of ?

After Firefox 3.5 crashed for the 10th time in an hour or something like that, I finally cracked down and started on getting uzbl (pronounced "usable") working.

Install and launch uzbl, and you're likely to not see how nifty this little browser is. There's no title bar, no navigation, no keybindings; you get a blank white screen. What's the big deal? I can do that in something like 20 lines of c using the OpenGL library (it's a 3-D white screen, even).

The first thing to realize is that there is no default configuration. If you want to go to a page, you must launch the program with something like: `uzbl --uri www.uzbl.org`. Now, this isn't very usable, since you have to open a new browser every time you want to go to a new url (like I used to do in lynx before I found the 'g' command).

Thankfully, there is a very easy way to get a basic configuration. If you're used to vimperator (and you should be, if you still use Firefox), then you'll be all set by copying the sample configuration (likely under /usr/share/uzbl/examples) into your XDG_*_HOME locations. The color scheme is a bit ugly, but it gets the basic information across, and you can use all your favorite vim keybindings, except the ones that are bound incorrectly. I reconfigured mine so that top of page is gg, and bottom of page is G, instead of the defaults of << and >>, for instance. If I could indent and dedent text on the fly, those would be the commands for that.

The biggest difference between the uzbl and vimperator keybindings, however, is that uzbl starts in command mode, not insert mode. I've typed my username into the command bar dozens of times already, because I'm used to clicking in a text field and having it steal my input focus. Not so with uzbl! You must hit i to go to insert mode, just like in a real editor. I hear there are ways to make uzbl perform like emacs, but matters of religion aside, it's not that hard to get used to vim-like behavior.

Since uzbl subscribes to the UNIX philosophy, there's also no notion of tabs. This makes it very amenable to being embedded into gtk+ applications, since those can either implement tabbed browsing or not as appropriate. This is a little reminescent of the Microsoft way, with IE browsing-only windows able to be embedded into anything. You know, if you like having all your apps that want to render HTML be vulnerable to .NET-based attacks or something.

In order to get tabbed browsing, there is a Python wrapper called uzbl_tabbed.py to implement it. The source is pretty straightforward; it opens a new uzbl process every time you create a new tab. This can be a great way to test your configuration, since new tabs use the latest configuration, and old tabs stay the same. Of course, if you blow up uzbl_tabbed impressively enough, it won't clear out the fifos and sockets in /tmp and you'll be left with a problem resembling Firefox's "already opened" message. Except with no error message, unless you start uzbl_tabbed.py from a terminal. For me, CADIE is just about perfect for this.

Having now figured out tabbed browsing and how to make the keyboard bindings more sane, I figured the only thing that I needed to keep Firefox around for was flash. Every once in a while, there's a purpose for it, like my bank's online banking login. They still have a "deprecated" HTML version, but I'm not about to be caught locked out with a check waiting to bounce if I can avoid it. To my great surprise, uzbl supported flash right out of the box. I don't know if this is just because of my distro's package, or if it's actually in the version of webkit that uzbl is built on or what, but it means I can do online banking, and the occasional youtube video. Oh, those silly, silly people shaking babies...

So far uzbl can do everything I use Firefox for. What could there possibly be that's bad?

No (or very limited) incremental rendering. This means that clicking on a link sometimes offers absolutely no immediate feedback that something is happening. But, one of the mottos of UNIX tools is that "no news is good news." Unfortunately, the internet being what it is, this is more like a GNU tool where no news is, well, no news. Pages eventually do load, but seem to take forever, since the entire page has to load and render before anything shows up. Since it doesn't clear the old page until the new one is ready, it's easy to click a link a few times without realizing that uzbl is trying to get the page for you.

Downloading files is a little weird. GTK+ already has support for downloading files, so why build it into uzbl? This makes a lot of sense, as it makes the browser more lightweight and doesn't duplicate functionality, but even w3m has a download manager.

uzbl uses webkit. I really don't like webkit as much as Gecko; it isn't as widely-recognized as a "real" rendering engine, so sites aren't designed or tested with webkit browsers. Maybe the iPhone and Chrome are changing this, but Safari seems to have done very little to be taken seriously, so it's an uphill climb. On the other hand, at least it's not IE.

(editor's note: wow, was I right about Chrome making webkit a standard browser)

uzbl_tabbed is pretty bare-bones. Tabs aren't shortened when there isn't enough room; there's just an ellipsis to show that more tabs exist. How many more? Good question. What tabs are over there past number 3? An equally good question. I'm sure this can be fixed by hacking on the script a little, but I haven't started on that yet. There is an option for gtk+ styled tabs, which is (thankfully) turned off by default. I'm guessing that the gtk+ notebook tabs handle this much more sanely than the text tabs. Of course, they also take up more screen real estate, and I've only got 600px from top to bottom.

Bookmarks. What are those? uzbl has no concept of a bookmark. There are scripts to implement this functionality, but one of the coolest extensions I use for Firefox is Xmarks (formerly FoxMarks, formerly Google Browser Sync). Automagically, I can bookmark a page on a computer at school and it shows up on my laptop. Delete a bookmark on my laptop and it's gone from the systems at work. UNIX Firefox doesn't show it; Linux Firefox doesn't show it; Windows Firefox doesn't show it. Pretty freakin' cool. Setting the same thing up in uzbl will likely require rsync and cron and a few hours of mucking with scripts. Or learning git.

Japanese text. This is really an issue I have with gtk+ in general. Kanji are roughly half again as large as kana and extend above and below the baseline. WHY?!? It's nice that this makes the kanji bigger and therefore a little easier to read (pack 29 strokes into 16px high and it's more a Rorschach Test than reading), but it looks like a little kid's handwriting with letters all different heights. Or, since they're printed, maybe like a ransom note cut out of magazines. "If you ever want to see all your characters the same height again..."

All in all, uzbl is pretty neat so far. I dislike being dependent on Python in general (run a Python 2.4 script in a 2.6 interpreter to see why), so instead of hacking on the tabbed browsing script, I may just write my own. Then again, that would mean I'd have to restart my uzbl session, and that's been going for longer than I've gotten out of Firefox since upgrading. Plus, Firefox seems to have amnesia lately and won't restore my tabs from last time, except when it crashes (which, yes, is embarrasing, but leave the witty commentary to Chrome).

If I ever get Chromium working on Linux (I haven't tried in months, so it could be a fun project for next weekend), expect Browser Wars to continue for some time; with more than just Firefox and lynx, I actually get a choice now for my Linux browser. It's about time we caught up to Windows on this one.

:wq

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