Testing out qutebrowser

Posted on December 21, 2021

I have been cycling between web browsers for the last few years. I used to use Opera, but then it became a shell for Chrome, then I started using Chromium, but occasonally got huge memory consumption, then I started using Firefox, but lately it has become very laggy (to the extent that even scrolling was slow). So, after testing a bunch of less commonly used browsers, I have finally settled on qutebrowser.

qutebrowser is a keyborad focused browser (which is like a cheery on top for me), but what I realy like is the fact that is lightweight. I have been using it for a week, and everything seems to work correctly. I’ll collect my tips and tricks for customizing qutebrowser here.

Setting as default browser

Suprisingly, setting qutebrowser as the default browser was a bit unusal. The usual:

xdg-settings set default-web-browser qutebrowser.desktop

did not work. A quick test showed that

$pacman -Ql qutebrowser| grep desktop
qutebrowser /usr/share/applications/org.qutebrowser.qutebrowser.desktop

So, the desktop entry is called org.qutebrowser.qutebrowser.desktop! Once I knew this, setting qutebrowser as a default browser was easy:

xdg-settings set default-web-browser org.qutebrowser.qutebrowser.desktop

Update: No longer using qutebrowser

Qutebrowser does not support the standard Chrome/Firefox extensions. For the most part, I can live without extensions, but one that I really need is Zotero integration. Quite often I’ll come across an interesting paper, but don’t have time to read it. I save (and categorize) such papers right away using Zotero, so that I can read them at a later date.

There is a user script for zotero, which basically parses the current URL, extracts the PDF, and passes it to Zotero. However, most of the papers that I read are behind a paywall, so the script cannot download the PDFs. So, I have to resort to “download paper -> manually import to Zotero” which is too time consuming.

I am still using Zotero for one off tasks (like previewing output for a Hugo-generated website), but it is no longer my daily driver.

This entry was posted in Web-Browser and tagged qutebrowser, xdg-settings.