
Uzbl: Lightweight webkit browser following the Unix philosophy - amarsahinovic
http://uzbl.org/
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habitue
I think people are missing the point here. So yes, the webkit portion is large
and complicated, but the idea here is that you can use whatever you want to
script together the ui pieces and keyboard commands etc. That is really useful
if, for example, you want to use your WM's tabbing of windows, rather than
have the tabs built into the browser itself (or not use tabs at all and use
different desktops entirely). The point is that with some of these minimal
linux systems (mostly Arch+awesome/xmonad/dwm etc), you can integrate the
browser itself better because uzbl is designed to be accessed in the smallest
atomic unit a browser can actually be.

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revelation
Browsers are the antithesis of the "unix philosophy". They do everything from
cryptography to typography to networking to accelerated graphics. And its
still not enough for people.

(I don't need to mention that just because you put a thin layer on top of a
monstrous browser library that does all of the above, that doesn't make the
scope of your program limited, right?)

~~~
jfb
But they _need_ to. All of those functions are necessary to interact with a
world more sophisticated than that of 7-bit ACSII.

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dscrd
Well, an alternative, perhaps a better, world would be one where those things
were provided by common high quality libraries.

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dkersten
Been using uzbl on Arch for a few months now. Great little browser!

The biggest _selling point_ for me was the keyboard-centric control. I use a
keyboard-centric window manager and I use vim for code editing, so everything
I do on my Linux install is with the keyboard and uzbl makes web browsing
keyboard based too.

~~~
StavrosK
I have to say, of all the browsers I tried, Opera's keyboard control was the
best. I tried Uzbl for a bit, but I can't say it was very easy to navigate
links with its keyboard controls.

~~~
iamapipebomb
What does opera use for link navigation? I just see link step/cycling in the
opera documentation [1]. Is there a better paradigm than link hitting [2]?
Opera always seems to have impressive hidden tricks.

[1] <http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/nomouse/> [2]
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgAWfqwzxck#t=9m15s>

~~~
StavrosK
Hum, I didn't discover link hinting in my very short stint with Uzbl, but I
might say I prefer Opera's mode: Pressing shift and the arrow keys allows you
to navigate links visually, i.e. as they appear on the page. Since this
scrolls the page too (to the next link), this is faster when you have to
scroll around to find the links.

It might not be faster than hitting one key per link, but it's more intuitive
than the link-cycling all the other browsers do. Give it a shot, you might
like it.

~~~
dkersten
_I didn't discover link hinting in my very short stint with Uzbl_

Oh.. I figured that link hinting is _the_ way of navigating links in uzbl, so
if you did not discover that (the cheat sheet lists it!) then you really
missed out. As for page scrolling, hjkl does that just fine IMHO (actually, I
use AltGr+u/j/k/l because hjkl is not convenient on my keyboard layout).

~~~
StavrosK
I'll give it another shot, I basically just installed it and played around a
bit with it, I didn't give it an extensive look...

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dengste
There's no such thing as a "lightweight webkit browser". Just because you
delegate all the hard stuff to a library, you're not "lightweight".

~~~
bonzoesc
It means the UI isn't implemented in JavaScript or maybe that it doesn't
support extensions. It's kind of a useless word to describe software.

Fun drinking game: drink every time you see a github project, ruby gem, or
Linux package labeled "lightweight."

~~~
wzdd
I would say it is a very well-defined word which means "the type of thing that
I am implementing is typically very large and complicated, and I don't yet
understand why".

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perlgeek
The Unix philsophy works great, because it allows you to pipe data from one
program to another, and thus build something that you want from primitives.

Now I wonder, how can a Unixified browser combine with other shell programs in
a meaningful way?

Without having tried it, I'd expect all of the controll stuff (actual browsing
experience, ad blocker, bookmarker) to be written specifically for this
browser. Is that correct?

~~~
gizmo686
Based on my experience with other software I suspect what will happen (if this
catches on enough) is: The early versions will work well when piped together
in more or less the intended way (admitly missing the point of the UNIX
philosphy). People will start hacking together other ways of combining the
pieces with each other and third party programs, and find certain combinations
impossible. Based on these use cases, the program will be modified and/or new
programs will be added to aid in the compatibility that was lacking or overly
difficult. Eventually, new combinations will stop being difficult and people
will marvel at how someone figured out how to integrate all the pieces so
smoothly and/or marvel at how it was ever thought to be difficult.

Of course, if this project does not get the traction it needs from people
willing to contribute (either to the code, with 3rd party scripts/programs,
blogposts, ETC), then we will be stuck with programs that do not work well
with other programs and turn into Windows. (In fairness to MS, powershell
looks like a promising attempt to get a modern UNIX philosophy ecosystem
going.)

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ustcscgy
Wow, as a emacs user, I think the "conkeror" browser is better : it's entirely
based on firefox, but uses javascript as its extension languge. Just like
Emacs, kernel + extension , instead of lightweight or 'unix philosophy'

~~~
LeonidasXIV
It uses JavaScript as extension language, just like… Firefox? Impressive!

I'm always annoyed when people don't realize that Firefox is basically Emacs:
the actual engine is called XULRunner and has a renderer called Gecko and
supports stuff like sockets. Firefox is on top of it, implemented basically in
JavaScript and the UIs are described by the XUL format which can be compared
to GTK+'s Glade-files, Qt's UI-files or XAML.

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noahc
I came across <http://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/> today and thought it was
similar to uzbl. I noticed there's not an easy way to install it short of
compiling it your self on Ubuntu though. Not a big deal, really, just not
something I'll attempt today.

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Bjoern
I really like Uzbl, but I noticed that after a couple of "tabs" it gets really
slow unfortunately.

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nuttendorfer
Couldn't get this to run on OSX despite installing it through macports. Would
love to use it as well on Windows as Chrome keeps getting more and more
bloated

