 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today, we're gonna be talking a little bit about my experiences with Qt browser Now I've wanted to use Qt browser for some time But what's really pushed me over the edge and actually giving it a good go is all the shenanigans surrounding firefox now I've been searching for an alternative to firefox Ever since the whole firefox thing went down if you want to know everything that went down I'll link to it in the video description or the One of the cards above me, but I've been trying to find a alternative. I've not been all that successful I don't care for brave. I think it's a little bit too pushy for me. It like it just takes over your Everyone I'll talk about that in another video Don't get me angry at brave Matt. It's gonna be okay I've tried I tried chromium But now chromium is going to be losing the ability to sync stuff through your Google account Which makes chromium completely useless because it's the only reason why you'd use chromium I believe and at least in my opinion so I Just decided to go ahead and try Qt browser And I was always a little bit hesitant because I don't want to go through and use my browser completely with a keyboard even though I'm a keyboard Vim guy and You know, I use a window manager and all that stuff. I'm never I'm pretty much attached to my mouse when it comes to the browser. I like to click things I like to scroll using the thing I've Gotten better at using some Vim bindings in a browser. I've even used of them Plug-in for Firefox and Chrome winner or whatever So I've gotten better at it, but It was that knowledge that I would have to use quite a bit more of my you know keyboard They always kept me from using Qt browser, but with all the shenanigans with Firefox going on I just you go ahead and decided to give it a try for a whole week. I Was not successful in the whole week I use it for mostly but there are a few things that I just could not I couldn't stomach using Qt browser for and I'll talk about those So let's actually go ahead and look at Qt browser. This is Qt browser Not out of the box. I've done a little bit of customization on it But not much one of things I haven't done is there's a way to go through and convert the the Tomo file or any of the Tomo config file into a Python config file and then you can do all your configuration via Configuration file instead of using their GUI thing. I Have not done that. I Might do that eventually because I'm gonna create some key bindings and stuff But for now, I've just went through and done pretty much used I've this is pretty much stock Qt browser. I've done very few customizations on it outside of I've enabled it so that When the when I have pin tabs if I close Qt browser, they come back That actually might be the only one for the most part. It's just completely stock. So Here, let me just go through a few things that I that I like about it. So I've actually come to like The keyboard focus of it So I like being able to press the okey and go to youtube.com. Oops. I actually got to type this right and Just you know Do this? I like the whole You know, I like that the keyboards basically locked into like a Vim style normal mode so I can't actually go through and you know Start typing in something unless I go into insert mode. I kind of like that. It keeps me from entering text willy-nilly You know, I accidentally I Found that it's actually fairly fast. It's not as fast as Firefox And definitely not as fast as Chrome, but it's not slow like some of the other You know keyboard-driven Browsers out there that I've used like surf and stuff to surface got awfully slow It's just really bad and you got to go through and patch it if you want to do all these things So it was you know, it's fairly fast I Do like that. I also Enjoy the UI for the most part if I were going to continue to use it I would change the text at the top or the font at the top I would also probably make those a little bit bigger or I wouldn't make it so that they would go away You know completely because you can do that. So there's a hole if you're not using the Python Config file you can do something called colon set and that will take you to all the Settings that you could do and there are tons and tons of them They're not very well explained. So like a lot of the ones that like let's see here Let's see if I can find one. Let's get out of colors So like a true one of these ones that are set true It doesn't tell you what the options really are you can set it true And obviously there you could sell it set of false with some times you have other options like always or Never or something like that, you know, like this the one here ask It doesn't tell you what the the options are other than ask so So it's just you know It's kind of guess it will tell you if you put in something that's not an option So it'll actually come up with like a little like air at the bottom But you really got to be quick to see it because it just disappears like very quickly So that's one of the problems that I had but I said This is very complicated. So I guess I've kind of transitioned into the things that I don't like about it But it I'm not really complaining that it's complicated because I enjoy that there's all these, you know Options before, you know, like a new user or whatever that I could see that this could be very very complicated and you know unwieldy Really my experience was fairly good as a web browser Intel, you know, I got Into certain situations. So actually one last thing I talked about how you're in kind of a them normal mode And I have like I have spreadsheets here that I have open all the time for word counts And I also have like a fanfic fiction, you know tracker thing and I edit these things all the time And one of the things I really like is you can't go through and actually edit any Text or anything without going into insert mode and that's actually proved so I can actually use Vim keys In Google Docs and you I cannot be able to find how to do that in any other browser if for no other reason I'm gonna keep using Keep browser just so I can use Vim key bindings in Google Docs. It's amazing Seriously, it's the best thing ever That being said, there are several things that are just not great. So The first thing I will say is that it does not do very good with zoom And and by zoom, I don't mean like the conference call thing I mean actual zoom like zooming in on web pages Let's say you're you do a lot of reading like articles or you know, I do stories and fanfiction or whatever If you do those things and you read something and you have it zoomed in so you can actually read it So the text isn't so small you and you know, you navigate away from that into a different tab The zoom goes away and there's no way to get it to remember the zoom levels for website I'm assuming that has some has to do something with cookies. That's just the way it is and that's unfortunate It's not a big deal. It's not as big a deal as some of the other things that I found that I don't like but it's kind of annoying The biggest area I had a problem with and the thing that had me running back to Firefox Was ad blocking Queue browser does have ad blocking It's not good, but it does have it. So if you just if you're talking just Like normal Google ads on a website like a blog or something chances are it'll probably block it if it's not a Google ad And it's on some a website. It may not block it But that's not a big deal where it becomes a big deal Actually is going through and watching a YouTube video YouTube ads are terrible and Even as a youtuber, I can completely understand if you don't want to watch the ads on my videos I understand I don't watch very many ads on videos either I will turn off ad blocker on some creators that I enjoy But for the most part like if I'm watching a youtuber that has like a billion subscribers or something that I'm sorry Linus tech tips man, I'm turning off the ads on The Google ads on your thing on your YouTube channel because I don't want to watch them and That's just because I can even do the whole the beginning like pre-roll ads It's when they interrupt the videos, you know You know, I mean the interrupting the videos like every five or ten seconds or whatever to show me an advertisement. I don't want that Cube browser completely ignores those videos the ad blocker You cannot get rid of ads on YouTube with cube browser. At least not without some hacky hack thing But you know creating a key binding or whatever that will take you to actually playing it into MPV or something. I Did not do that. I just went back and use Firefox That's does whenever I wanted to use YouTube. I went to Firefox and that's because I hate ads on YouTube and that's just that's the biggest takeaway. I have you know on for this this whole experiment is That cube browser I could actually I could use Cube browser daily. It could be my daily driver. I love the fact that I can use them Bindings in Google Drive. I love it. I think it's fantastic I I've come to really enjoy the keyboard navigation of going, you know into certain situations where it is just completely Keyboard driven. I love it Even with the extension in Firefox to use them key bindings on some things It's not as seamless as it is here in cube browser. I love those things But they're all all those good things that I could 100% Get behind and use and love our overshadow shadowed by the Horribleness of the ad blocking Now I know there are other Solutions like you could create a pie hole or whatever it's called to block advertisements I'm not gonna go through that and do that. I'm just gonna find a different browser. That's the thing is If the ad browser or the ad blocking was better, I'd use cube browser, but the ad blocking is god-awful some of the other things that I noticed is That sometimes this the the startup on it is a little laggy. I'm not sure why I'm pretty sure that this is just my system or It's possible that it's because I have those pen tabs and sometimes the those pen tabs take a while to load or something I don't know. I didn't notice it before I had the pen tabs to make something that's a problem It does remember so it does allow cookies to be saved So because it remembers your login even you know like login if you log into Google or Facebook or whatever it'll remember that you're logged in So that's good. I wish it did the same thing for the zoom So but really so my week with cube browser has been mostly positive If it weren't for the YouTube ad blocking situation, I would be switching to keep browser today I would be uninstalling Firefox and using cube browser that locking man. It's just it's not good And like I said, I know that as a youtuber I should want people to watch ads, but YouTube ads are bad If they if they could just may have good way of doing ads like just keep them at the beginning You know we're beginning or the end or whatever Or even better let the the creator choose where those interstitial ads are so that they can work into the content You know, so if you let me pause here for an advertisement And instead of I'm halfway through a sentence and all of a sudden you're not actually listening to me anymore You're listening to an IKEA commercial. It's dumb and that has nothing to do with you with cube browser. It just that I Noticed more with cube browser because I have ad blocker on all the time for most of the things I use on YouTube and The fact that it's gone on cube browser was very jarring What I would really wish they would do is to find some way to Use you block origin now. I'm not sure is you block origin open source. I Feel like it is I mean because it's in LibreWolf and LibreWolf is open source So I'm assuming that you block origin is open source But that might be a wrong assumption But even then there has to be an open source ad blocking solution that they could build in I mean understand I think cube browser is just one dude that does the development of it. So it's probably asking too much Come he's just you know one guy. So, you know, you can't ask Take this huge mungus project done But it would be so good if you could just take an open source ad blocking solution If you especially if you block origin is open source, but or whatever and build it in Keep browser would be so I mean a hundred times better It is completely usable and I'd have no problem with it. So That is my experience with keep browser I'm going to keep it installed simply because of those Vim commands in Google Google box. So good. Oh, so good But for most for I'm gonna stand Firefox until I find a different solution. I'm probably gonna try Vivaldi next I've wanted I've just really wanted to try something that's not Or the I wanted to stay with open source And Vivaldi's closed source, but I'm gonna give it a try So anyways, if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you didn't give it a thumbs down in the comments below Let me know your experience of the cube browser because maybe you found a way that you can block those Pesky at interstitial ads on YouTube and keep browser. I would love those. I mean really seriously when it be great I mean, this is completely I mean Complete rant, but I would I've rented like four or five times in the city about ads on YouTube Really what I would love to do is be able to watch the ads at the beginning and skip the ones that are in the center So we need to add a blocker that allows you to do that because then I can support the creators that I watch Without having to watch those crappy interstitial ads. Anyways, that is it. Give us a subscribe. Give us a like all that stuff patreon.com slash linuxcast. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time