What is Reddit's opinion of
dwb?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
9 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
> This isn't minimal if you have to have 4-5 windows open instead of just one.
For tabs you could always use tabbed which can turn any other kind of window into tabbed windows too.
But I agree. There's a tradeoff between minimalism in terms of software footprint, and utility. I brought up surf as a bit of an extreme in minimality; personally I just use firefox (with uBlock) nowadays, having previously tried other minimalistic browsers such as dwb and luakit.
I used Pentadactytl for a while, liked it quite a bit, but then realized I didn't need all the bells and whistles of Firefox+Pentadactyl, so I decided to try out some of the more minimalist, keyboard-driven (webkit-based) browsers being actively developed by the Linux community.
Of dwb, luakit, and uzbl, the one I fell in love with and use day in and day out is dwb. I have customized my keybindings, etc. to perfection, and my browsing/workflow is more enjoyable than ever. Moreover, the developer of dwb is super active--he has a whole slew of cool extensions that you can manage from the command-line--and very responsive to feedback, in terms of both answering questions and implementing suggested features.
I will admit that both Firefox, with its thousands of add-ons, and Pentadactyl, with its huge amount of commands, are both much more powerful than dwb, and that was what kept me from straying too far away for a long time. But then I realized that, realistically, I only used like two or three add-ons and only a small percentage of all the possible Pentadactyl commands.
So yeah, I'd suggest checking out one of webkit browsers. If you're like me, you won't miss those unnecessary features of FF/Pentadactyl, and you won't look back. And if you submit bug reports and feature requests, then it's a great way to star giving back to the open source community.
Sounds like you're too much of a power user to migrate. I too use a couple of addons (vimperator, tree tab) that makes it real hard to migrate to something else.
That said, lately, ffox (apart for the gtk3 fiasco) has gotten better, not sure how to describe it, but ffox 45 seems definitely more responsive than before.
I think if you're really seriou about switching you're going to have to go to one of those minimalistic uber-configurable browsers such as
surf: http://surf.suckless.org/screenshots/
or
dwb: http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/
Spend some time configuring to fit your needs and then find out that it won't be able to do everything that firefox does. (for instance, i wouldn't expect lastpass to work on any of these browsers).
TL;DR you'll need to compromise, get some of your hard requirements of that list or stick with ffox.
Raw speed, memory usage, and number of processes are rather pointless, in my opinion. The best browser for everyone is the one the person in question feels most comfortable with and satisfied needs aside pure OOTB performance. For me that's Firefox due to its customizability and enormous amount of add-ons, and I've been using FF since early 2003.
Of course I also use a couple of alternate/backup browsers for the rare case FF gives me troubles, but none of them are from the "big five", i.e. none of the browsers tested in the article. They're Midori, dwb, and - for use in a terminal - w3m.
It's… Firefox, with the pentadactyl plugin and
:set guioptions=bCrs
No menu, no tabbar (press b to get a tabs list, and 2/3 letters to filter - example ), no bookmarks bar (I use quickmarks mainly or :bmarks).
I also use dwb on my good old T60.
>I don't give a shit about special features
I've been giving dwb a spin. It's about as feature-free as it gets. It's basically just the rendered page, and then a bunch of Vim-like bindings. So nice. I can see a URL in a text file in the terminal, hit gx on it, and have dwb split open a new pane in i3, then ctrl+q out again when I'm done.