dwb (webkit?) woes.

karol · 2014-07-24 21:51:14

I like dwb, but it I have some problems with it. That's why I'm still using Firefox, as I've been doing for the past decade or so.
I don't want to clutter the main dwb thread with my questions (and some I've already asked there) and I'd like to update the dwb wiki page with the answers and explanation I might get here. I would really like to make dwb better.

The wiki says 'dwb is an extremely fast, lightweight and flexible web browser' but it's not exactly so for me.

1.
When I go to https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit … ckages/0ad and click on 'packages/0ad' list in the top right, webkit-based browsers (dwb, qupzilla etc.) max out my cpu for several seconds before the list is shown. When I close it and click it again, it takes even longer.
I have no idea why, does it have something to do with caching or lack thereof?
Firefox opens the list instantaneously and the list takes up only 10 cm of the screen, not top-to-bottom, like with dwb.

2.
dwb doesn't seem to release the used memory. When I'm visiting multimedia-heavy websites, it may go e.g. to 500 MB, later dip to 350-400 MB when I leave that website and stay at that level, even under pressure from other applications i.e. it seems dwb holds on to this memory, even if it means the system has to use swap for other apps' needs.
If I restart dwb all is well for a while (~150 MB is OK with me), but after prolonged use I'm faced with a similar situation again.
Firefox doesn't have this problem, even if it's a bit more RAM-hungry from the get-go.

3.
I've heard it's possible to color visited links only for the current session. When I restart dwb they return to the 'not visited' color.
Again, Firefox can use its history (or some magic pixie dust) to keep the links colored as 'visited'.

Am I stuck with Firefox + pentadactyl?
I know that vimb doesn't really suffer from the second issue, because it doesn't implement tabbing internally. Instead, it uses 'tabbed' which links separate vimb instances. I can close a "heavy" tab and memory use goes down.

Trilby · 2014-07-24 22:03:38

Aside from the vimb caveate, do you suspect these are really dwb issues, or just general webkit issues? It's been my (personal and perhaps not particularly well informed) opinion for some time that webkit is effectively dead in the water.

I brought up the idea of a gecko backend for dwb in the dwb thread sometime back, and that doesn't seem likely, but Portix claimed a Blink backend may be possible (Blink = the new google-maintained sibling of webkit). While being more controlled by Google gives me pause - they will at least keep it working. Webkit suffers from too many cooks with two many different recipies: google devs stopped bothering and broke away with chrom(ium/e) and now blink, meanwhile the apple devs ignored every bug report that didn't affect safari (or only patched it in safari). So webkit just grows mold.

PS: I think I'm going to have to subscribe to all your new threads - you keep working on all the tools I really want to love, but that have a few show-stopping quirks.

Last edited by Trilby (2014-07-24 22:05:46)

karol · 2014-07-24 22:07:52

I'm happy with improvements in the form of some js magic, hacks etc. while waiting for a Blink-based dwb :-)

New Opera is uses Blink too, right?

Trilby · 2014-07-24 22:15:29

Whoa ... I just tried out opera. I'm going to have to see if that can be stomped into a dwb/luakit/pentadactyl like shape. I'm not sure if it uses blink, but not only does it not have a dependency on a seperate rendering engine, but it has no toolkit dependency!

A graphical browser with no qt/gtk dependency has been my holy grail for some time now (netsurf came close with it's alternative builds - but it just didn't measure up).

If this (opera) is blink, I hope that can get worked into dwb. It's damn fast, and handles all of my finicky sites (that webkit craps out on) just fine.

Last edited by Trilby (2014-07-24 22:18:48)

karol · 2014-07-24 22:25:56

dwb + its plugins is already faster than bare firefox and I 'm not using bare firefox so ...
There are some glitches in dwb, but maybe it's not even webkit's fault, maybe it's cairo or something.

Which opera package are you using exactly?

I hope some of the threads I start will help me fix some things. If they help others too - even better :-)

Trilby · 2014-07-24 23:02:28

I just installed opera from the repos. It does seem to use a gtk file dialog for download/saveas stuff - but gtk isn't a dependency, so unless it's a packaging error ... I'm not sure what opera would do if gtk wasn't there. I may have to test that on one of my other machines where doing away with gtk would be a little easier. (It's a goal, but it's not currently a practical goal on my every-day machine).

karol · 2014-07-24 23:15:19

I'm pretty sure this is still the old opera.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/opera-developer/ is the new one. It depends on gtk.
http://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2014/06/ … er-stream/

Trilby · 2014-07-24 23:26:40

I found firefox was the only thing I had that actually dependend on gtk - so I removed them both (as a test). Opera still worked just fine. I tried the file download, and now instead of using the gtk file dialog, it used it's own ... and it looked a lot nicer than the gtk one!

I've got to look into the opera code.

Sorry if this was a OP tangent - but finding a toolkit-free browser that works well is really a huge find for me

Last edited by Trilby (2014-07-24 23:27:23)

karol · 2014-07-24 23:32:02

Trilby wrote:

I've got to look into the opera code.

Isn't it closed-source?

HalosGhost · 2014-07-25 00:06:45

karol wrote:

Isn't it closed-source?

Yes, with some open-source components (the only reason I didn't switch full-time to Opera long ago).

All the best,

-HG

Trilby · 2014-07-25 00:10:06

Ah, damn. Oh well - it's still pretty impressive and hope inspiring.

qinohe · 2014-07-25 00:32:19

Opera is not only fast, it shows almost all pages correct, it's my main browser since I can;t remember.
It doesn't do it all, though, I play HTML5 files from ampache in Firefox, cause Opera can't do it, at least two months ago.
I know it's closed source, and I like to get rid of that, though, I have no replacement for it, I tried a lot, Firefox to bloated and layout sucks, the webkit browser never seem to do what I want etc. etc.

karol · 2014-07-25 00:38:52

I'm having deja vu https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 9#p1237569 ;P

Trilby · 2014-07-25 01:01:47

And apparently I have crappy memory

abner · 2014-07-25 21:05:36

Trilby wrote:

I brought up the idea of a gecko backend for dwb in the dwb thread sometime back, and that doesn't seem likely

I hope I'm not stepping on any toes by mentioning this but Portix mentioned in the dwb irc channel today (or last night, can't remember which exactly) that he is working on a gecko browser but it is very early (planning) stages right now. He said he hoped to have a basic functioning browser by Christmas. Whether it will be anything like dwb or not he didn't say.

Last edited by abner (2014-07-25 21:05:56)

karol · 2014-07-25 21:18:57

That would be a nice Christmas present :-)
Thanks for the info. His bitbucket repo doesn't show any new project, so the planning phase is still on, but I'll keep an eye on it.

Trilby · 2014-07-25 21:41:19

Whoa ... that'd be the best Christmas present I could hope for. I'm glad it may turn out to be a possibility.

HalosGhost · 2014-07-25 22:50:08

Dear Santa (portix),

For Christmas this year, I would like a web browser with the following attributes:

gecko-based
support for privacy features (DNT, {ad,script} blocking, HSTS and HTTPS-Everywhere, Privacy Badger, etc.)
minimal (but customizable), vim-like interface and keybinds

I promise to be a good kid!

All the best,

-HG

Steef435 · 2014-07-26 00:59:15

HalosGhost wrote:

Dear Santa (portix),
For Christmas this year, I would like a web browser with the following attributes:
gecko-based
support for privacy features (DNT, {ad,script} blocking, HSTS and HTTPS-Everywhere, Privacy Badger, etc.)
minimal (but customizable), vim-like interface and keybinds
I promise to be a good kid!
All the best,
-HG

Please, please be a good kid.

Dwb currently has ad and script blocking support by the way.

HalosGhost · 2014-07-26 01:11:06

Steef435 wrote:

Please, please be a good kid.
Dwb currently has ad and script blocking support by the way.

Ad blocking caused major instability last time I checked.

All the best,

-HG

karol · 2014-07-26 01:14:39

I've never had problems with dwb's ad-blocking, but I don't think you can whitelist, which is a grrr.

karol · 2014-07-26 17:08:05

xombrero (formerly known as xxxterm) can color visited links with

save_global_history = 1

setting. Is it thanks to https://opensource.conformal.com/viewgi … a6b0d431e3 ?

OT: can anyone tell me how to get rid of scrollbars in xombrero?

show_scrollbars = 0

and

man xombrero wrote:

show_scrollbars Enable or disable the showing of the horizontal and vertical scrollbars.
Disabling this setting requires GTK3.

doesn't make sense. I did install gtk3, I even recompiled xombrero - didn't work. 'show_scrollbars = 0' doesn't change a thing.

To get rid of the startup message

$ xombrero
GLib-GIO-Message: Using the 'memory' GSettings backend.  Your settings will not be saved or shared with other applications.

install dconf.

karol · 2014-07-27 00:30:50

I found out that xombrero doesn't have a problem with anchors in links. dwb can't reliably open a link in a new tab, if it contains '#', like e.g. links to specific posts on this forum.
Unfortunately both issue 1 and 2 remain unsolved.

If I can keep the visited links history, I can restart my browser, but I'd rather close the offending tab, like with vimb.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-07-24 21:51:14

dwb (webkit?) woes.

#2 2014-07-24 22:03:38

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#3 2014-07-24 22:07:52

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#4 2014-07-24 22:15:29

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#5 2014-07-24 22:25:56

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#6 2014-07-24 23:02:28

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#7 2014-07-24 23:15:19

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#8 2014-07-24 23:26:40

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#9 2014-07-24 23:32:02

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#10 2014-07-25 00:06:45

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#11 2014-07-25 00:10:06

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#12 2014-07-25 00:32:19

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#13 2014-07-25 00:38:52

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#14 2014-07-25 01:01:47

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#15 2014-07-25 21:05:36

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#16 2014-07-25 21:18:57

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#17 2014-07-25 21:41:19

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#18 2014-07-25 22:50:08

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#19 2014-07-26 00:59:15

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#20 2014-07-26 01:11:06

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#21 2014-07-26 01:14:39

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#22 2014-07-26 17:08:05

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

#23 2014-07-27 00:30:50

Re: dwb (webkit?) woes.

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