Searching For The Right Minimal Browser

so I have been thinking about trying out a minimal web browser you guys know I'm all against the blue I like minimal programs and recently I've been thinking about my web browser I have been a Firefox user since the beginning since the beginning of Firefox right since that that project started I have been a Firefox user and before Firefox came into existence I was a Netscape user going back you know into the mid-90s so that's all I know is that browser Netscape / Firefox I was never an Internet Explorer user even when I was running Windows I never used any of the windows browsers now Microsoft's edge browser never used it and never used Google Chrome other than on an Android phone I've used the mobile Chrome but on a physical machine I have never installed that proprietary garbage that is Google Chrome I've always been a Firefox user and recently I've started thinking you know what I should try a more minimal browser because as great as Firefox is it's anything but minimal it's quite heavy and bloated just like any modern browser just like chrome is in chromium and Microsoft edge pretty much all the mainstream browsers are big heavy and bloated and they have just a ton of features which can be good for some people but for me I'm much more basic much more simple I just want a window that renders a webpage that's really all I want so the the past couple of weeks three four weeks actually I've been playing a lot more with the surf browser which is suck Lass's surf browser it is based on the WebKit engine and it is a really interesting browser it's got some nice features to it there's a lot I like about the surf browser but at the same time I've come to the conclusion that the surf browser is not a viable option I have heavily patched my surf going to go ahead and package my custom build of surf for you guys that want to try it out but I can tell you surf does have some issues let me switch to my desktop and let me actually launch the surf browser so this is my surf browser this is a custom start page here in the surf browser but it does meet some of the qualifications that I want in a minimal browser I think for a browser to be minimal I don't need to ever see tabs I don't need to see a tab bar I don't need to see a URL bar I don't need to see you know file edit preferences of any kind of menu I don't need to see any of that stuff except when I need to see it so if I need the URL bar you know in surf here I think I just ctrl G for go in G go anyway you and then I can you know search through some of the histories or bookmarks that I have and now I see a URL bar it's it really just D menu that launches inside surf and then you know I can go to the URL that I want to go to if I'm going to go back ctrl H you know the Bianchi's hjkl do a lot here in the surf browser which I like that it uses some of them like bindings so the surf browser does a lot of things right it gets that minimal experience right but why have I come to the conclusion that the surf browser is not right for me let me open up my YouTube page and let's wait for the page to finish loading think the page is finally finished loading now that that took a minute right that that takes a long time that is a very long time for the a web page to launch and that's not unusual my YouTube page is not some special web page I could have picked any other kind of modern heavy page that has a lot of graphics or a lot of JavaScript stuff going on a lot of ads if I wanted to I mean let's go to cnn.com you know because it's a news site it's gonna have a ton of ads and multimedia and all kinds of other stuff loading on the page that actually didn't load too slow I mean that was not as bad as the YouTube page loading but you know it's still that that's not fast right and I'm not one of these web browser snobs where I'm timing how fast pages load in milliseconds or something right people tell me oh chrome is faster than Firefox and Vivaldi is faster than this and this is faster than that and you know I most modern web browsers I've never noticed a difference of speed because they're so close if there's a difference I don't think most users would really notice but I'm telling you right now the surf browser is slow that WebKit engine that it uses is terribly slow it loads some pages you know like it takes five times as long for some of these pages to load and serve as it does in Firefox and it's frustrating it's not going to be a good experience while I think the web browser gets a lot of things right I really like some of what goes on with surf the speed is a problem also performance is a problem for some reason the surf browser uses a ton of CPU and RAM it just does again I think it's part of the problem with the WebKit engine that it uses I also just think it's just a poorly built web browser I think the suppli skies because they try to do things the suck list philosophy with as few lines of code as possible and as minimal as possible they've built this very nice minimal web but in a lot of ways it's kind of broken now if you want a pleasant web viewing experience the surf browser unfortunately as much as I really want it to work it's limited I'm basically looking for the surf browser a minimal surf like experience but something that renders web pages a lot faster so I'm gonna get rid of the surf browser and I've started looking at some other options and I found three different browsers that I'm gonna start trying out myself the first one is cute browser now I've heard about the cute browser for a couple of years now I've actually installed it two or three different times and just briefly tried it out for a few minutes on my machines over the years never really tried it out long term but it does seem like it meets a lot of the criteria that I want out of a browser let me watch the cute browser here so the cute browser again is another kind of minimal web browser you know it gets rid of a lot of the cruft and you know the tabs and the URL bars and all of that it kind of hides all that extra stuff mainly just a plain window I mean I do have actually the tabs here at the top I could probably hide that if I wanted to I mean it offers a lot of customization but I don't mind having the tabs visible that is a pretty small bar at the top it's not eating up a lot of screen real estate it's mainly keyboard driven just like the surf browser uses a lot of them like key bindings for opening a URL instead of ctrl G which was what we used in surf I think just colon and O for open yeah and then I could give it a URL it does show the history though and I liked one of the default history things is the key bindings themselves the default key bindings Ncube we could actually look through this if I wanted to open a tab there's actually tabs built into cute browser there are is not tabs built into surf you actually have to use a secondary program for tabs if you want to use tabs I installed so classes tabbed for surf but we don't have to do that with cute-cute actually has tabs I believe if I look for some of the tab stuff looks like this keybinding right here G capital C for tab clone so G capital C basically opens up a second tab the same page that we were in in a second tab and from here you know I could navigate to a another webpage let's see how long my YouTube page takes to render in the cute browser you know what that was quite a recent video I mean let me mute that that was not bad and that's surprising that's very surprising because the cute browser is very much like surf in that it uses the WebKit engine the same engine let the surf browser uses but it looks like it renders web pages a lot faster let me try again another kind of heavy page let's again I'll travel to CNN's website this because I know it's got a lot of ads and a lot of images you know that that loaded so much faster than the surf browser I would definitely prefer to use the cube browser right now rather than surf I may start using the cute browser it may become my main browser of choice at some point I don't know what I've gotta experiment a little more with it but I didn't just download the cute browser to try out I wanted to try a couple of different things and another one I came across the other day was yum B and this one I had never heard of now cute browsers been around for a little bit and I've heard about the cute browser somebody mentioned them B the other day to me and I was like what the hell's gonna be well it's a film-like browser once again it uses the WebKit engine so surf cute browser and vim B all use the WebKit engine which is the same engine the Apple Safari uses for those of you wondering what the hill the WebKit in engine is and them be you know it's a minimal experience this is Thembi again no toolbars no URL bars none of that no tabs I don't think them B has built-in tabbing but we can get tabs inside vmb by just using the suck list tab to program since I already have it on the system if I just run tabbed space vim B and then give it this flag - e it will launch a Gumby with tabs now because my version of tabbed is a patched version that automatically auto hides the tabs that my tabs won't show until in my build I hit alt ctrl and then it shows me the tabs if I release off control they go away I do alt ctrl enter I can oh a second tip and once again once I release all control you know the tabs go away that's just tab that really has nothing to do with me MB but VMB same kind of browser right no toolbars nothing it uses film like bindings very similar to cute browser you know you can do : o - or open and I could actually type I don't know google.com would that actually work yes so some of the bindings are very similar in vim beta cube browsers which could be helpful if I'm gonna play around with both but I think it would be interesting actually for me to open well not in that though let me get out of that search form and see does it remember my history have I been to my YouTube page it doesn't look like I've been to it let me type youtube.com slash destroy - lets see how long this page loads in vim beep again WebKit browser you know and if that's very fast it seems very similar to cute browser both cute browser and youngbae though seem better then surf at these pages just load faster than the surf browser so and we haven't opened up a CH top or anything it'd be hard for me to get accurate readings because I've got several different browsers open right now including Firefox on a separate screen and I'm recording in OBS I've got a lot going on but I can tell you just opening up a CH top cute browser and youngbae they just suck up a lot less CPU and RAM then surf I don't know why but that is the case then B's pretty interesting if I open up a file manager let me open up a graphical file manager this is PC man FM if you go to dot config in your home directory Thembi does create a directory inside your dot config directory and inside that directory you're not going to have this file by default but I did find a sample config file on their website and this is a bimby config and this is where you can set things like font font face font size various color settings you can set your default search engine of course you can set some keybindings if you don't like the default key bindings I use I set my start page to a custom page that I created a local page here on the system so if I just launched them B I won't bother with the tabs no this is my start page the same start page that was in surf let me close vim B so that's a little bit of what I you know I haven't really played with cute browser or MB at all I've just downloaded them like in the last couple of days there was one other browser I may or may not take a look at but I will discuss it on this video cuz some of you guys have asked me about men the men browser now this is not quite as minimal as the three browsers I've already shown you it's not in the same league as surf cute browser vim B but men is still a pretty minimal browser it's designed to be fast minimal and privacy respecting it does do some add and tracker blocking which is nice that that's kind of built into the browser you see some screenshots here the screenshots look very nice I mean it does have a title bar but it's like a single title bar everything's kind of condensed the tabs and the URL bar are all kind of in one bar as long as well as the window decorations but using a tiling window manager I'm not gonna have window decorations in the windows anyway so it looks pretty neat if I switch to the desktop let me launch me in so you get C min out-of-the-box this is min and it opened up some tabs when they close some of these tabs alright and then this is really the default page when you launch me in for the first time you get this welcome screen welcome to min you can take a tour the tour is just the min website and it tells you a little bit kind of what's going on with the browser some settings you can sit pretty self-explanatory I will say min it's probably not going to work for me because there's a couple of things right off the bat just for me personally I don't like this bar at the top I don't need the menu bar and as far as I can tell there's no way to get rid of it at least there's no way to get rid of it in this bar I would have assumed that somewhere in the view menu there would be like a option to disable that bar but there isn't one there is this focus mode thing but the focus mode what that does is in focus mode all tabs except the one you're actually on are hidden so let me turn that on so if I open a second tab I go to file here and go to a new tab and you can see that the key binding is here too I could just do ctrl T to open a new tab as well so you can see without the focus mode turned on we have tabs right I can open up a new tab if I want to go somewhere in this blank tab I can just click on the new tab and you get these search or address bar depending on whether you want to do a search or actually enter a URL maybe I want to go to google.com you know matter of fact let me instead when we try youtube.com slash distro tube and let's see how long this page loads in men I expect this to load quite a bit faster and you know it loaded pretty quickly now min the other reason I don't think I'm gonna use me in its other than it's not quite as minimal at least the display is not as minimal with the bars and the tabs and everything the other problem is it is based on the chromium engine and I would prefer not to use a web browser that uses google technology and if I go back to their github page they mentioned that the men browser uses an older version of chromium which may be missing security fixes from later versions so they're basically saying they're using a version of the chromium engine that may actually have some security bugs in it then that's kind of a strange thing to do and to say right there on your page so I probably won't do much with the men browser but you know I just thought I would throw it out there for some of you guys that are looking for a more minimal browser maybe you don't want to go as minimal as surf cute browser vim be those those are pretty minimal maybe you want something that actually has menus and tabs and URL bars and it's not quite as keyboard drill you can you can use keyboard shortcuts in men but of course you can just you know click things and get you know normal URL bars and search bars and you know you can view your bookmarks you can import bookmarks also import and export bookmarks here inside the men browser you can also get a display of all your open tabs and switch you know graphically through your tabs so it's not like you're hitting all these weird them like key bindings especially you guys that are not used to doing things in a keyboard centric way the men browser actually may be a better option for you guys for me I'm probably gonna take a pretty hard look at cute browser and youngbae here in the near future now before I go I want to thank a few special people this show was sponsored by Michael Mitchell Chris DJ Donnie Dylan George Kaplan 8 lambda Omri Rob Sean and Willie these guys there are the producers of the show they're my highest tier patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode about these minimal web browsers wouldn't have been possible the shows also brought to you by all these ladies and gentlemen all these names are saying on the screen right now all my supporters over on patreon without each and every one of those ladies and gentlemen the channel wouldn't be possible so I want to sincerely thank each and every one of those folks if you'd like to support the channel consider doing so you will find me over on patreon just look for distro tube over on patreon all right guess lease

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 138,110

Keywords: web browser, best web browser, linux, gnu linux, linux web browser, minimal web browser, lightweight web browser, fastest web browser, suckless surf, surf browser, qutebrowser, vimb, vimb browser, webkit, min browser, best browser, best internet browser, bloated web browsers, chrome alternative, firefox alternative, browsing the web, distraction free browsing

Id: b8kxdiskGzI

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020