Web Browser Reflections

Reflections? Reviews?

I'll preface this by admitting I'm both biased, and am in an edge segment of users. I don't like my software to spy on me; I don't want it reporting anything I use it for to a company. There was a time when I could caveat that and say when it would be OK, but I don't think we live in that world anymore: any information any company collects will eventually be monotized, and possibly weaponized. It's bad enough that we can no longer browse the web in peace and relative anonymity; I don't want a web browser that makes it worse. That's my bias.

I'm also biased against mice. Mouse pointers, track pads, track balls, whatever. They have their uses, but building entire workflows around them was, I think, one of the biggest mistakes the computer industry ever made. While I have vast respect for Rob Pike and everyone involved with Plan9, I can't use it because it requires using the mouse for almost everything. The mouse is Bad UX, and the proof ironically comes from Jeff Raskin, one of the inventors of the Mac UI and an important figure in the human factors space. Jeff helped inject science into the study of how humans interact with computers; he was at least partially responsible for putting the menu bar of every application at the top of the screen in MacOS, rather than at the top of the window as it is in Windows. The reason for this was simple: human coordination is relatively bad at the up/down movement needed for mouse vertical accuracy, and putting the menus at the top of the screen took all of the need for vertical accuracy out of the equation. A user need only shove the mouse to the top of the screen, and they're in the menu bar. The irony is that Jeff also contributed greatly to the propegation of the mouse in UIs, but perhaps that's unfair: mice were already a necessary input device by the time Jeff was doing his work for Apple. The irony comes in that mice are horrible input devices for most activities. They're really great for many things, but just horrible for everything they're not ideal for. Want to draw a picture? Mice are about the worst input device you could imagine; most serious digital artists use graph pads, and draw with digital pens. They're bad for almost everything except web browsing, and that's only because web browser designs are based around mice! I've discussed my complaints about mice elsewhere, but we've come back around to web browsers, which is what I wanted to talk about in the first place.

There are several projects that prove that the mouse is not necessary -- nor even the most efficient -- device to use for web browsing. surf, vimb, luakit, and nyxt are just four of many browsers which are designed entirely around keyboard entry. The problem is that most of them don't work very well in one way or another. Here's the reflections-slash-review part.

Nyxt

Nyxt is a really decent browser, and works with most sites that gives trouble to anything that's not Firefox or Chrome. The key binding choices are also really well thought out -- much better than most. But it freezes. A lot. Like, I have to kill -9 it multiple times a day -- multiple times an hour, if I'm using it a lot. Also, it's one of those projects that heavy sigh chose Lisp as their customization language. I really don't understand why people do this; Lisp is, and will always be, a niche language that is not easily picked up by non-Lisp programmers. I have respect for Lisp, but I think it's a really dumb choice for a customization language. I'm not overly fond of Lua, but at least it's popular and easily worked with by anyone who's ever done any programming.

Luakit

Segue to Luakit: Lua is the language that Luakit uses for a configuration/customization language, and it's really easy to work with. Luakit works fairly well with most sites, but there are some that require me to open Firefox to use, because Luakit just can't handle them correctly. Luakit's UI engine has so many quirks that using it is a frustrating process. For example, scrolling will just randomly stop working; maybe switching to another tab and coming back will get it working again, but it's just really flaky. It also is extremely sensitive to complex Javascript; even pages like Github can cause tabs to crash -- but at least they don't take the whole browser with it. I also don't like the modal, vim-like operation, which is weird because I really like modal text editors. The problem is that -- unlike a text editor -- the modality is more obscure and makes interacting with web pages challenging. I've accidentally closed pages, hit the back-button key, and done any number of things that have lost me work simply because I popped out of input mode while typing and hit a disaster-causing key. Nyxt's method is far better, and I didn't realise how much better until I tried Nyxt.

surf

Surf is the suckless entry, and I won't go too much into it because there's a really good criticism someone on Lemmy wrote that boiled down to: the list of patches for Surf is enormous, and you need most of them to make it a usable browser, which both makes it difficult to maintain (update) and defeats the "suckless" philosophy. At one point, I had my own git repository of patches -- including quite a bit of my own customization code -- and would painstakingly upgrade it when there were changes, and honestly, I switched when I realized that I didn't want my day job to be merging surf patch conflicts. It also used an old version of WebKit, which is a common factor in many browsers that cause problems with the modern SPA web we have to navigate.

nvim

nvim was my first foray into a truly keyboard-based browser, and I learned most of what I currently value from it. It originally kept most data in plain text files, which were trivial to work with using CLI tools, and had the most awesome version of read-later: a push/pop queue. It's still a feature that few browsers implement, which baffles me as it completely addresses the infinite tabs problem. However, at some point it started shoving stuff into a database, making the information less accessible for command line tooling, and then it did some funky stuff with cookies that made it hard to clean up after... and that's when I switched to surf.

Right now...

I'm using luakit. Nyxt really is great, but the hard-freezing needs to be addressed before I'll go back to it. Also, while I was able to customize surf and luakit to use nvim-like flat files, I just can't bring myself to get into the byzantine customization of Nyxt: having to dredge up my atrophied Lisp skills and learn their bespoke API at the same time is too much. But it's not a great place to be; luakit is slow, and the scrolling thing really sucks, and not being able to use a fair percent of the web really sucks.

I can't emphasize enough just how important it's become to me for, well, browsers mostly, to use plain text files to store data. I literally have a bookmarks file that nvim created ages ago; and when I went to surf, I customized it to use that same file for bookmarks. And then when I went to Luakit, I customized it to use the same file. And I have a dozen command-line tools for working with bookmarks: adding, searching, uniq'ing, etc, which I have been using between browser changes because I don't have to keep importing and exporting from whatever dumb-assed file format or database the browser wants to use. Luakit does bookmarks it's own way; I just completely ignore that and hooked keybindings for bookmarks up to my tools. It's so fundamentally valuable, I'm surprised it isn't a more widely discussed paradigm.

So: the quest continues. People keep making more browsers, and I Nyxt is so new suppose it's good evidence they'll keep doing so. Right now, I'm hoping Nyxt will become more stable within the next year, at which point I may bite the bullet and do all of the customization to get it to use my queue and bookmarks instead of its own bespoke DB format.

I don't have a closer, or wisdom, or even a witty remark to end with; only that I can't really end this post until I find The browser. If I ever do, I'll have a nice, tidy ending. Until then, fair winds for your own journeys; maybe you'll have better luck than I have.