[jay.scot]
[003]
--[ Qutebrowser is amazing but..
**UPDATE** as of version 2.0, these are not an issue now. Time to move
back to Qutebrowser!
For those preferring browsers with a minimal GUI and vim-like keyboard
controls, Qutebrowser is a fantastic choice. The project can be compared
to Firefox add-ons like Vim Vixen but with a smoother and more refined
user interface, backed by an active creator. With that being said here
comes the but.
And it's a big BUT for me, I no longer use Qutebrowser due to lack of
privacy options compared to the likes of Firefox with add-ons. Does
Qutebrowser have any choices at all for privacy? It sure does, BUT for
the requirements of today's modern web it's just not enough to cut it.
This is a list of things that you can do:
* disable javascript
* disable geolocation
* disable webgl
* custom http headers
* custom user agent
* reject cookies
* stop canvas reading
* host based ad-blocker
Although the problem is not a poor list of choices, each of these
choices has very limited scope. For example, the ad blocker is
a primitive host based list from a flat file. You're going to get video
ads and page elements still showing. It just doesn't compare to add-ons
like uBlock Origin, where all ads traces are just erased. Setting
cookies to deny all the time often contributes to a poor user
experience.
As an example, I will be constantly be asked to fill in CATCHPA's for
every site sitting behind CloudFlare. However, I can install a cookie
cleaner on Firefox that manages cookies on a per site basis, deletes
them as soon as you navigate off the site, close a tab etc.
I also discovered that Qutebrowser does not function as intended with
the option to hide the referrer header. This is currently an upstream
issue with the engine Qutebrowser uses, QtWebEngine. In the hopes that
this gets resolved, I have opened a bug report directly with the
project.
Using the EFF's browser fingerprinting tools might show you as rather
unique compared to Firefox with the privacytools.io recommended addons.
In order to randomise the User Agent and HTTP Accept headers, I also
tried to write a Python script to do this in Qutebrowser. Although the
finger printing was improved, it was just not as good as using Firefox.
Once the Qutebrowser feature list has plugin support, I would definitely
switch back to Qutebrowser once it has been implemented, but
unfortunately Firefox and addons are the way for me.
SOURCES
-------
>>
https://qutebrowser.org
>>
https://github.com/ueokande/vim-vixen
>>
https://privacytools.io/browsers/#browser
>> git://jay.scot/dotfiles.git
>>
https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/30
EOF
