Qutebrowser 1.11.0 web browser release has been released, that provides a minimal graphical interface that does not distract you from viewing the contents and navigation system in the style of the Vim text editor, built entirely with keyboard combinations.
The browser supports tab system, download manager, n modeprivate service, the built-in PDF viewer (pdf.js), the ad blocking (at the host lock level), an interface to view visit history and to watch videos on YouTube, external video player call can be set.
The user can move around the page with the keys "Hjkl", press "o" to open a new page, toggle between the tabs with the "J" and "K" keys or the "Alt-tab number".
When you press ":", a command prompt is displayed, where you can search the page and run typical commands, as in vim, for example, ": q" to exit and ": w" to save the page.
The browser keyboard shortcuts are as follows:
Of which the most basic are the following:
- ":" → It will give us access to all commands in the program itself.
- "Jk" → We can move by a web page.
- "Or" → It will allow us open a new page.
- "D" → Let's close the tab in which we find ourselves.
- “J” and “K” → We will have the possibility of move between tabs using these two keys.
- "F" → This key will give us the possibility of click.
- “/” → After this bar, we can write the search term on a web.
- ": Q" → It will allow us save open tabs and exit the program immediately.
The browser code is written in Python using PyQt5 and QtWebEngine. The fonts are distributed under the GPLv3 license. Using Python does not affect performance, as the Blink engine and the Qt library perform content rendering and parsing.
What's new in Qutebrowser 1.11.0?
In this new version of the browser, the inclusion of initial support for Qt 5.15 stands out, since by default, when compiling with QtWebEngine from Qt 5.14, the local search remains in a loop (after reaching the end of the page, it jumps in the beginning).
Add to new settings: content.unknown_url_scheme_policy to control application launch external when opening links with an unknown scheme in the URL, content.fullscreen.overlay_timeout to set the maximum display time for a full screen overlay and hints.padding and hints.radius to customize the appearance of the tracks.
Also added new placeholders for url.searchengines:
- {unquoted} inserts the search term without a quote.
- {semiquoted} (same as {}) quotes most special characters, but slashes
they continue without quotes. - {quoted} (same as {} in previous versions) also quotes forward slashes.
Mouse wheel scrolling is now prevented while hints are active and several improvements were made to the mkvenv.pyscript (mostly useful for development) along with minor overall performance improvements for the browser.
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 python3-pip pip3 install --user pyqt5 pypeg2 jinja2 pygments sudo apt-get install python3-venv sudo apt install python3-pyqt5.qtwebengine python3 scripts/mkvenv.py
And we can run the browser with the following command:
python3 qutebrowser.py