qutebrowser/doc/FAQ.asciidoc

Frequently asked questions
==========================
The Compiler <mail@qutebrowser.org>

[qanda]
What is qutebrowser based on?::
    qutebrowser uses http://www.python.org/[Python], http://qt-project.org/[Qt]
    and http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/intro[PyQt].
+
The concept of it is largely inspired by http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/[dwb]
and http://www.vimperator.org/vimperator[Vimperator]. Many actions and
keybindings are similar to dwb.

Why another browser?::
    It might be hard to believe, but I didn't find any browser which I was
    happy with, so I started to write my own. Also, I needed a project to get
    into writing GUI applications with Python and
    link:http://qt-project.org/[Qt]/link:http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/intro[PyQt].
+
Read the next few questions to find out why I was unhappy with existing
software.

What's wrong with link:http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/[dwb]/link:http://sourceforge.net/projects/vimprobable/[vimprobable]/link:https://mason-larobina.github.io/luakit/[luakit]/link:http://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/[jumanji]/... (projects based on WebKitGTK)?::
    Most of them are based on the http://webkitgtk.org/[WebKitGTK+]
    http://webkitgtk.org/reference/webkitgtk/stable/index.html[WebKit1] API,
    which causes a lot of crashes. As the GTK API using WebKit1 is
    https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-gtk/2014-March/001821.html[deprecated],
    these bugs are never going to be fixed.
+
The newer http://webkitgtk.org/reference/webkit2gtk/stable/index.html[WebKit2
API] seems to lack basic features like proxy support, and almost no projects
seem to have started porting to WebKit2 (I only know of
http://www.uzbl.org/[uzbl]).
+
qutebrowser uses http://qt-project.org/[Qt] and
http://qt-project.org/wiki/QtWebKit[QtWebKit] instead, which suffers from far
less such crashes. It might switch to
http://qt-project.org/wiki/QtWebEngine[QtWebEngine] in the future, which is
based on Google's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(layout_engine)[Blink]
rendering engine.

What's wrong with https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/[Firefox] and link:http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/[Pentadactyl]/link:http://www.vimperator.org/vimperator[Vimperator]?::
    Firefox likes to break compatibility with addons on each upgrade, gets
    slower and more bloated with every upgrade, and has some
    https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/[horrible
    ideas] lately.
+
Also, developing addons for it is a nightmare.

What's wrong with http://www.chromium.org/Home[Chromium] and https://vimium.github.io/[Vimium]?::
    The Chrome plugin API doesn't seem to allow much freedom for plugin
    writers, which results in Vimium not really having all the features you'd
    expect from a proper minimal, vim-like browser.

Why Python?::
    I enjoy writing Python since 2011, which made it one of the possible
    choices. I wanted to use http://qt-project.org/[Qt] because of
    http://qt-project.org/wiki/QtWebKit[QtWebKit] so I didn't have
    http://qt-project.org/wiki/Category:LanguageBindings[many other choices]. I
    don't like C++ and can't write it very well, so that wasn't an alternative.

But isn't Python too slow for a browser?::
    http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/van-rossum-python-not-too-slow-188715[No.]
    I believe efficency while coding is a lot more important than efficency
    while running. Also, most of the heavy lifting of qutebrowser is done by Qt
    and WebKit in C++, with the
    https://wiki.python.org/moin/GlobalInterpreterLock[GIL] released.

Is there an adblocker?::
    There is a host-based adblocker which takes /etc/hosts-like lists. A "real"
    adblocker has a
    http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/25j41u/adblock_pluss_effect_on_firefoxs_memory_usage/chhpomw[big
    impact] on browsing speed and
    https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/[RAM
    usage], so implementing it properly might take some time and won't be done
    for v0.1 if at all.

// We link to github rather than to the file here so it also works with the
// qutebrowser :help because that doesn't render HACKING.