qutebrowser development blog

Happy 9th birthday, qutebrowser!

Florian Bruhin — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 21:19:56 +0100

qutebrowser is turning 9 today! I’ll use the opportunity for a – perhaps slightly tl;dr – overview of how it all came to be. As you might notice by the length of this post, stopping to write once I started writing something like this… isn’t exactly my forte! Hopefully …

Better nightly builds on CI, state of Qt 6 support, and steps towards v3

Florian Bruhin — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 15:17:28 +0200

Today I've worked on improving the nightly build support on CI, and nightly builds are now finally available as individual files instead of being zipped into one big one.

This means it's now easier for people on macOS and Windows to test the latest changes before they are released, by …

CVE-2021-41146: Arbitrary command execution in qutebrowser on Windows via URL handler

Florian Bruhin — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 19:28:57 +0200

I'm happy to announce that I just released qutebrowser v2.4.0!

This release fixes a high-severity arbitrary command execution on Windows via URL handlers, see the security advisory and commit message for details.

Windows users are urged to update as soon as possible. For everyone else, this is a …

qutebrowser moving to Libera Chat

Florian Bruhin — Wed, 26 May 2021 10:52:52 +0200

This blog has been lying dormant for almost a year now, but rest assured it's still alive. I usually don't bother posting minor release announcements here (they can be found on the announcement mailinglist as well as the subreddit), on top of that I totally forgot writing a blog post …

Paying it forward

Florian Bruhin — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 12:02:48 +0200

As mentioned in my last post, I'm earning what's basically a small part-time income from qutebrowser donations - thanks again to everyone who's donating money, it means a lot!

To pay it forward, I decided to donate to some of the projects qutebrowser is relying on:

3$ per month (indefinitely) to …

Paving the road towards qutebrowser v2.0

Florian Bruhin — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 22:15:46 +0200

Today, it's been exactly 6 months since I launched the GitHub Sponsors campaign - time flies!

I wanted to use this opportunity to update everyone on what has been going on, on my plans for qutebrowser's future, and on various other bits and bytes - I have a lot of things I …

2019 qutebrowser crowdfunding - reminder

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 18:54:38 +0100

Two months ago, I wrote:

Just like in the 2017/2018 crowdfundings, it'll be possible to get t-shirts and stickers again. I'll also add some new swag to the mix :)

Just a quick reminder: If you want physical rewards with the current perk levels, sign up to the GitHub Sponsors …

qutebrowser meetup Berlin (2019-11-28)

Florian Bruhin — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 20:55:50 +0100

I (The-Compiler) am currently in Berlin - I've met with Qt/QtWebEngine developers at Qt Contributors Summit and had some very interesting development discussions there. There are some writeups available in the Qt Wiki.

Next Thursday (28th) I'd like to have a small qutebrowser user meetup here :) We'll meet at 19 …

2019 qutebrowser crowdfunding with shirts, stickers and more!

Florian Bruhin — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 14:51:15 +0100

I'm very happy to announce that the next qutebrowser crowdfunding went live today! o/

This time, I'm focused on recurring donations via GitHub Sponsors. Those donations will allow me to work part-time on qutebrowser! Thanks to the GitHub Matching Fund, all donations (up to $5000 in the first year) will …

Current qutebrowser roadmap and next crowdfunding

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 15:50:02 +0200

More than half a year ago, I posted a qutebrowser roadmap - I thought it's about time for an update on how things are looking at the moment!

Upcoming crowdfunding

I finished my Bachelor of Science in September at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil.

Now I'm employed around 16h …

Crowdfunding 2019 ideas

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 16:46:38 +0200

Just a quick announcement: I'm planning another crowdfunding in 2019, likely focused on monthly donations so I can spend 2-3 days a week on qutebrowser soon!

With this survey, I want to gather some ideas/opinions about possible merchandise and some other topics:

https://s.cmpl.cc/ideas

Happy birthday, qutebrowser!

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 16:46:38 +0200

5 years ago today, this happened:

commit 11a94957dc038fc27c5ff976197ad2b2d0352d20
Author: Florian Bruhin <git@the-compiler.org>
Date:   Sat Dec 14 22:15:16 2013 +0100

    Initial commit

That's how qutebrowser looked a day after that (and that commit still seems to run!): https://imgur.com/a/xoG1r4G

Exactly a year later, things …

CVE-2018-10895: Remote code execution due to CSRF in qutebrowser

Florian Bruhin — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 18:02:29 +0200

Description

Due to a CSRF vulnerability affecting the qute://settings page, it was possible for websites to modify qutebrowser settings. Via settings like editor.command, this possibly allowed websites to execute arbitrary code.

This issue has been assigned CVE-2018-10895.

Affected versions

The issue was introduced in v1.0.0, as …

qutebrowser v1.3.3 released (security update!)

Florian Bruhin — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 02:04:18 +0200

I've just released qutebrowser v1.3.3, which fixes an XSS vulnerability on the qute://history page (:history).

qutebrowser is a keyboard driven browser with a vim-like, minimalistic interface. It's written using PyQt and cross-platform.

The vulnerability allowed websites to inject HTML into the page via a crafted title tag …

qutebrowser v1.2.0 released!

Florian Bruhin — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 23:28:43 +0100

I'm happy to announce that I just released qutebrowser v1.2.0!

qutebrowser is a keyboard driven browser with a vim-like, minimalistic interface. It's written using PyQt and cross-platform.

This release comes with a long changelog, but the most interesting changes are probably initial support for per-domain settings (I've had …

T-Shirts shipped, initial implementation of per-domain settings

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 08:14:44 +0100

Last Saturday, I finally managed to ship all t-shirts with some much appreciated help from a friend and my SO! You should hopefully get yours soon (I'd imagine starting today for people from Germany). I'd really appreciate it if you could send me a quick mail (mail@qutebrowser.org) or …

Current state of per-domain settings

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 22:30:08 +0100

Since I've been asked for the current state of per-domain various times, here's a quick overview:

History

I've planned to implement this as part of the recent crowdfunding, but things have taken a bit longer than expected there (and I like doing things properly rather than doing more but half-baked …

qutebrowser v1.0.0 released!

Florian Bruhin — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 11:16:42 +0200

I'm delighted to announce that I just released qutebrowser v1.0.0!

qutebrowser is a keyboard driven browser with a vim-like, minimalistic interface. It's written using PyQt and cross-platform.

This release comes with many big breaking changes such as the new config and QtWebEngine by default, so please take a …

qutebrowser v1.0.0 is coming closer

Florian Bruhin — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 21:12:21 +0200

just a quick update to let you know that the last one of four big changes is now done:

[x] The new completion, based on sqlite
[x] The new config system
[x] Dropping legacy support
[x] Making QtWebEngine the default backend

If QtWebEngine can't be used on your system for …

New config merged!

Florian Bruhin — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 19:15:11 +0200

It's been a long time since the last post here - a new update is way overdue, especially seeing that the new config was merged a week ago!

Apologies for the delay! After my exams and holidays were finished, I worked for another two days full-time (plus some more) last week …

Config revolution - Part 1 finished

Florian Bruhin — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 16:18:28 +0200

Since the last blogpost, I worked on the new config for another 5 days, so we're on day 17 now (already! Gnah...).

Sorry there wasn't an update in such a long time. I wanted to write a blog post multiple times, even wrote about half of it, and then other …

Refactoring more things, a working YAML config, and more!

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 21:01:28 +0200

It's day 12 of 20, and I did a lot more work on making everything (including tests) use the new config. I also implemented initial support for reading from/writing to YAML files.

This is how things look now:

154 files changed, 6128 insertions(+), 7000 deletions(-)

This is with all …

Refactoring all the things!

Florian Bruhin — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 21:13:15 +0200

New config

We're on day 8 already (time flies!), and I'm almost finished refactoring the entire qutebrowser codebase to use the new config. There are still some issues here and there and some missing changes (for :set and qute:config mostly), but qutebrowser is now mostly usable again without needing …

First week

Florian Bruhin — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 22:48:36 +0200

Phew, days 3, 4 and 5 are over already, and it's more than time for another update! Lots of code in this one... ;-)

Wednesday

On Wednesday, I took a closer look at the completion refactoring pull request and some sqlite performance issues it had.

I was able to get the …

First 2 days

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 18:45:28 +0200

Today was the first day in my "office" (the local hackerspace) working on qutebrowser, and day 2 of the crowdfunding in total!

Right now I'm preparing some things for the new config to be possible, and also finishing some work related to QtWebEngine and Qt 5.9.

Here's what happened …

Getting started again

Florian Bruhin — Sat, 03 Jun 2017 21:32:12 +0200

As you all probably know already, the crowdfunding for qutebrowser ended up being more than fully funded - thanks to everyone again!

The funds arrived on my bank account yesterday, minus some 10% fees for Kickstarter and payment processing. Yesterday also was the last day with lectures before my summer holidays …

Second qutebrowser crowdfunding launched!

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 17:53:11 +0200

Like last year, I'd love to spend my summer holidays working full-time on qutebrowser again!

This is why I started another crowdfunding - with the goal of finally implementing the new config system. See the Kickstarter campaign for details.

In a nutshell, that means:

There's a separate (optional) config file, which …

qutebrowser v0.10.0 released

Florian Bruhin — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 22:22:14 +0100

I'm happy to annouce the release of qutebrowser v0.10.0!

qutebrowser is a keyboard driven browser with a vim-like, minimalistic interface. It's written using PyQt and cross-platform.

I haven't announced the v0.9.0 release in this blog (or any patch releases), but for v0.10.0 it definitely …

Wrapping up and looking at the future

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 07:51:34 +0200

Looking back

As you might have noticed, it's gotten a bit more quiet here again. The reason for that is that, unfortunately, the 40 crowd-funded days are over (plus a few extra days), and today I'm starting to study computer science at the University of applied sciences in Rapperswil (with …

Days 39/40/41: Lots of features!

Florian Bruhin — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 22:44:21 +0200

A new blogpost is overdue, as I worked on qutebrowser again for the past three days! A lot of new features arrived, and this will hopefully make QtWebEngine usable as a daily driver for some people!

Adblocking

Perhaps the most exciting news first: adblocking is now available with QtWebEngine! The …

Days 37/38: Hints in master, tests

Florian Bruhin — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 20:23:01 +0200

Hints

Yesterday I merged the pull request I opened for the rewritten hint drawing and implemented the missing bits so only visible hints are considered.

Together with some other small fixes and cleanups, I then merged the qtwebengine-hints branch, which means hints are now working fine apart from some corner …

Day 36: Hints!

Florian Bruhin — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 00:23:23 +0200

Today I did a lot more work on hints! After some refinements on my hint drawing branch, I opened a pull request to get some feedback from other developers.

After that, I continued working on hints for QtWebEngine, and got the basics to work:

However, it doesn't filter hints which …

Days 33-35: Mouse functionality, and rewriting hints

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 23:35:50 +0200

Past Friday and on Monday I wasn't working on qutebrowser (apart from some usual maintaince tasks) as I was traveling to/from Evoke (which was great!). But there's a lot to write about from Wednesday, Thursday and today!

History

The first thing I got to work on Wednesday was the …

Days 31/32: More web elements

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 19:40:22 +0200

Apart from fixing some QtWebEngine bugs, yesterday and today I made some big progress with the web element code. I successfully split the web element code into a generic and a QtWebKit part, and then did a first implementation of the web element code for QtWebEngine, which made :navigate prev …

Days 29/30: Web elements

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 09:37:17 +0200

A lot of code got moved around last Thursday/Friday!

I finished working on the web inspector, which made dealing with javascript a lot easier! I also added a new utils.javascript Python module for various javascript-related utilities.

While working on the Python/Javascript bridge for web elements, I noticed …

Days 27/28: Settings and web inspector

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 09:37:03 +0200

As mentioned in the last post, I wanted to look at settings and having a web inspector before continuing to write javascript for web elements.

Yesterday, just as I was getting started with splitting up settings, I noticed a bad bug in how the private-browsing setting was handled. Due to …

Day 24-26: Refactoring the WebElement API

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 18:39:08 +0200

Last Thursday I finished the WebElement API refactoring to the point where the QtWebKit code and all related tests work normally again, and I merged the branch.

On Friday, I did some work because of a major pytest-qt release (2.0) and fixed some other small issues. After that, I …

Day 21-23: After Europython and releases

Florian Bruhin — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 18:22:36 +0200

This week I came back from EuroPython (which was awesome!), so on Monday I was busy with responding to issues, reading crash reports and reviewing PRs which accumulated during my "holiday".

Yesterday I released qutebrowser v0.8.0, as I had to get a new release out ASAP because of …

Day 19/20: Bugs everywhere!

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 14:29:08 +0200

If you're a programmer, you might know these days where everything just seems to fall apart from all the bugs you run into. Thursday and Friday were those days for me... ;)

But let's start with the things which went well first! I implemented more scrolling functionality with QtWebEngine (7adc8ab, 6958642 …

qutebrowser v0.8.0 released

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 14:29:08 +0200

I'm happy to annouce the release of qutebrowser v0.8.0!

qutebrowser is a keyboard driven browser with a vim-like, minimalistic interface. It's written using PyQt and cross-platform.

The main reason for this release is that v0.7.0 will break with PyQt 5.7 which is soon going to …

Day 18: Javascript

Florian Bruhin — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 20:17:06 +0200

Today I was mostly busy with javascript related functionality and writing some javascript:

Added logging for javascript console logging with QtWebEngine
Don't fail tests with QtWebEngine STUB: ... messages
Implement :scroll-perc via javascript
Implement :scroll-px and scroll.to_point (used for e.g. marks) via javascript
Implement :scroll-page via javascript
Various related …

Day 17: Printing and searching

Florian Bruhin — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 20:16:52 +0200

After looking at a pull request adding a :print --pdf flag to directly print to PDF (and an accompanying test), I noticed I totally forgot to add printing support to the new tab API. This wasn't caught previously because there was no test for printing (as it's hard to use …

Sending out qutebrowser and pytest stickers

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:50:15 +0200

Last Thursday, I sent out 68 letters to 19 countries, containing the stickers for the pytest and qutebrowser crowdfundings!

I already had the pytest stickers for a while, and recently recieved the qutebrowser ones as well:

As I had the data in a (somewhat messy) CSV from Indiegogo with notes …

Day 15/16: Merged!

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 19:07:23 +0200

On Friday and today (Monday) a dealt with a lot of little annoying issues, but I finally got the qtwebengine branch with the initial refactoring merged!

After incoperating some great code review feedback I got on Thursday and doing some other cleanups, I thought I was really close to merging …

Day 13/14: Almost merged!

Florian Bruhin — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 23:41:54 +0200

The past two days I was busy with getting stickers shipped out to everyone most of the time - I'll post a dedicated blogpost about that tomorrow with some pictures!

I still got some work in the qtwebengine branch done:

Lots and lots of cleanups and small fixes
Marked failing session …

Day 12: Tests running!

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 23:20:41 +0200

Today I got all end-to-end tests for the qtwebengine branch (still with the QtWebKit backend!) to work:

671 passed, 9 skipped, 8 xfailed

This means almost all qutebrowser code is now refactored to use a well-defined API over QtWebKit!

There are still some places (hints/downloads/editor) where I'm cheating …

Day 10/11: Refactoring!

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 04 Jul 2016 23:18:12 +0200

I haven't blogged on Friday, so consider this the blog post for Friday and Monday!

On Friday I had to go to the dentist again, so not as much time available as I'd hoped. I was mainly busy with some more organizational stuff for the crowdfunding and general maintenance. I …

Day 9: A bit of everything

Florian Bruhin — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 00:02:47 +0200

I'm back from the pytest sprint, which unfortunately got interrupted by me having to get my wisdom tooth out (which started to hurt shortly before the sprint...).

I'm back on track, but yesterday and today was full with various little things as aftermath of the sprint, and because I left …

Day 8: More fixing and pytest sprint/training

Florian Bruhin — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 11:05:15 +0200

(This blog post is actually a day late as I was busy packing for the pytest sprint yesterday)

Not too much exciting stuff this time - I mostly continued working on getting basic stuff like scrolling and zooming to work after the refactoring, and added a temporary fix for :navigate and …

Day 7: Fixing things

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 21:23:53 +0200

Handling callbacks

I did a small experiment today, trying to make it easier to use QtWebEngine functions which expect a callback, like QWebEnginePage::runJavaScript.

Normally, you'd call such a function like this:

def calc(view):
    def cb(data):
        print("data: {}".format(data))
    view.page().runJavaScript('1 + 1', cb)

What I …

Day 6: Branching off

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 18:08:10 +0200

After releasing v0.7.0 last Friday, I could finally start refactoring stuff for QtWebEngine support today.

Nothing really works properly yet, but I was able to open a website:

I also merged a pull request to master which adds a {host} replacement for the title/tab-title format settings, and …

qutebrowser v0.7.0 released

Florian Bruhin — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 15:55:57 +0200

I'm happy to annouce the release of qutebrowser v0.7.0!

qutebrowser is a keyboard driven browser with a vim-like, minimalistic interface. It's written using PyQt and cross-platform.

As usual the source release is available, binary releases (Windows as usual, and now also a standalone OS X .app/.dmg and …

Day 4: Playing whack-a-mole

Florian Bruhin — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 23:04:19 +0200

Today, I felt like I was forced to play whack-a-mole:

(Image cc by-nc-sa by Mommysaurus75 on Flickr)

The good

Everything started nicely: Someone posted a pull request to handle links with (non-standard) spaces correctly with hints (<a href=" http://example.com ">), I told them how to add a test, they …

Day 3: Last pull requests and managing requirement files

Florian Bruhin — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 00:22:21 +0200

Managing requirement files

Yesterday evening, I got side-tracked with another "small" side project which turned out to be a bit bigger.

qutebrowser comes with requirement files which pin all dependencies for the automated tests and other tasks (like linters).

This includes indirect dependencies to make sure builds are reproducible. For …

Day 2: More pull requests and nicer test output

Florian Bruhin — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 19:18:07 +0200

Better BDD output

Yesterday evening, a contributor had a nice idea of a better output for BDD style tests when they fail.

qutebrowser tests a lot of functionality using end-to-end tests which are written using the Gherkin language with the pytest-bdd plugin. Those look like this:

Scenario: Going back without …

Day 1: Merging pull requests, and a stupid bug

Florian Bruhin — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 20:47:30 +0200

Today was my first day of working on QtWebEngine, and as mentioned in the previous post I started with merging some pull requests before they diverge too much because of all the planned refactoring.

In the morning I was in the train without an internet connection, so I worked on …

About and Timeline

Florian Bruhin — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 13:08:59 +0200

Introduction

A bit over two months ago, I started a crowdfunding campaign for qutebrowser, with the goal of working full-time on adding QtWebEngine support to it, which will bring more stability, security and features.

I asked for 3000€ to fund a month of full-time work before starting my studies in …