qutebrowser 2.4 has already been released and these are its news

Few days ago the launch of the new version of the web browser «qutebrowser 2.4» was announced In it, some improvements have been made to ad blocking, as well as a solution to the vulnerability that allows code to be executed in the Windows version.

For those who do not know the browser should know that this provides a minimal graphical interface that is not distracting from viewing of the content, and a navigation system in the style of the Vim text editor, built entirely with keyboard shortcuts.

The browser supports a tab system, download manager, private browsing mode, built-in PDF viewer (pdf.js), ad blocking system, interface to view browsing history.

Scrolling through the page is done using the «hjkl» keys, to open a new page you can press «or», the change between tabs is done using the «J» and «K» keys or «Alt-numeric tabulator».

Main new features of qutebrowser 2.4

In this new version of the browser it is highlighted that the vulnerability CVE-2021-41146 which affects the Windows version has been corrected and is that windows installer for qutebrowser registers it as a controller for certain url schemes. With some applications such as Outlook Desktop, opening a specially crafted URL can lead to argument injection, allowing the execution of qutebrowser commands, which in turn allows the execution of arbitrary code through commands such as

Only Windows installations are affected and as such it is not necessary for the browser to be installed as the default browser for the exploit to work.

Regarding the changes that stand out, we can find that added "content.blocking.hosts.block_subdomains" setting, what can be used to disable subdomain blocking in ad blockers by redirecting domains through / etc / hosts.

Also added the "downloads.prevent_mixed_content" setting to protect against mixed content downloads (downloading resources via HTTP from a page opened via HTTPS).

And the "–private" flag was added to the ": tab-clone" command to create a clone of the open tab in a new private browsing window.

It is also noted that changing tabs by scrolling the mouse wheel now works correctly in macOS although if users do not want this function, this can be configured in "tabs.mousewheel_switching" setting false if you prefer the above behavior.

Finally if you want to know more about it About this new version or about the browser, you can check the details on its official website. The link is this.

How to install Qutebrowser on Ubuntu and derivatives?

For those who are interested in being able to try this web browser, they should know that the installation in Ubuntu as well as its derivatives is quite simple, since the package is within the Ubuntu repositories

To install the browser, we simply have to open a terminal (you can do it with the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T) and write the following command in it:

sudo apt update

And now we can install the browser with the following command:

sudo apt install qutebrowser -y

And that's it, you can start using this browser on your system.

Another installation method and for those interested in being able to try the new version (since the newer packages take longer to be updated in the Ubuntu repositories)

We can install the browser from the source code which we can obtain from la releases page.

There we we will download the Source code (Zip) package and we will unzip it in our team. To run the browser, just enter the folder and run the following commands:

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends git ca-certificates python3 python3-venv asciidoc libglib2.0-0 libgl1 libfontconfig1 libxcb-icccm4 libxcb-image0 libxcb-keysyms1 libxcb-randr0 libxcb-render-util0 libxcb-shape0 libxcb-xfixes0 libxcb-xinerama0 libxcb-xkb1 libxkbcommon-x11-0 libdbus-1-3 libyaml-dev gcc python3-dev libnss3

And we can run the browser with the following command:

python3 qutebrowser.py