While this isn't quite my cup of tea, it's nice to see Firefox being forked instead of Chromium. With this, there's now at least three significantly modified Firefox forks, alongside Zen and Floorp.
That's a sweet idea and I'm glad to see your comment about maintaining it as a patch on top of Firefox sources so you can roll in their security fixes.
I've run into the restrictions regarding addons.mozilla.org myself using Vimium C, but it didn't happen often enough for me to consider switching my browser over it. I think I'd rather have something that makes my entire Linux desktop environment keyboard centric at that point, like homerow seems to do for macOS.
I like the hints API, especially that it can hint on browser elements. However, power users may find it desirable to be able to use the hints system to select arbitrary kinds of elements. Perhaps you could extend the hint functionality to allow callers to pass a CSS selector that determines what elements get hinted? One use case is to write a command that lets the user choose an element and copy its text.
This is my dream browser. Thank you so much for this!! I love that by default all inputs work in modal text editing. Do you plan on adding more complete Vim motions do that? For example, daw to delete the word, D to delete to the end of line, etc.
Thank you! I just implemented the ones I use the most, e.g. diw, but the motions system is still in very early stages and there are lots of motions I haven't implemented yet.
I do plan on implementing as many motions as is feasible, but there are some intentional differences, e.g. `f` is used for hints instead of jump-to-char.
Does this support DRM? Like playing Netflix and other commercial streaming-sites. I remember this being a big problem with Firefox-forks. What about Firefox Sync?
Is RPC from external processes possible with this? For example, calling the URL of the open tab, or a list of open tabs and their URLs and/or content? Or remote control a tab, navigating to other URLs, etc? This would be interesting for integrating it with other apps and scripts, and Firefox is somewhat lacking in that field.
RPC is not currently supported but I agree it would be pretty interesting, tweety[0] was recently shared with me and that looks like it'd be quite nice, although I haven't tried it yet.
So far the only divergence from Firefox that could impact security is evaluating the config file, so I've described how that is sandboxed in the security[1] docs but I'm not super happy with the contents of that docs page; anything else you'd like to see mentioned?
Is it possible to automatically install extensions and set native Firefox configuration through the config? All my other programs are setup by just cloning my dotfiles and I really wish Firefox had that option.
I'm not very familiar with Helix keybindings myself but if there are vim equivalents (and if they're actually implemented, a fair amount of mappings are missing right now) then you should be able to! There's a `motion` excmd you can use in your mappings.
I don't think it'll be possible to implement multi-cursor support through the config though unfortunately.
found this on your ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear Blog. having fun with it. set it up like my zen browser (with the sidebar + pinned tabs) and testing it out for my productivity stack at work. I themed out the glide-hint css via userChrome.css to better match my aesthetics. keep up the great work, i will be keenly following along.
i typically have 5 tabs open, no more, no less. i always have them in the same order so that i can navigate via alt+1, alt+2, alt+3, etc.. one tab is always my personalised homescreen which has all the main links+software i use in a day. having them in the same order means i don't even need to look at the sidebar to navigate to them, it just helps to see what tab i am focused on sometimes.
This looks really cool! My current setup is Firefox with VimFX[0] and an elaborate config.js, but when the NixOS package gets merged I will definitely try it.
For anyone wanting to stick to stock Firefox ESR, I highly recommend checking out VimFX.
The big downside of VimFX compared to Glide is lack of Firefox internal API documentation. I've had to dig through Firefox source code several times to find out how to do things e.g. wrangle tabs that would have been easy to do with the WebExtensions APIs. The fact that Glide makes these APIs available in the config file is the part I'm most excited about.
I haven't looked at the source too deeply yet to investigate how you implement the fork, but you state that it's a fork of Firefox, how do you plan to integrate fixes from Firefox (security, etc)?
It's implemented as a set of patches + new files for net new files I add myself, then to build it, the firefox source is downloaded and patched automatically - so bumping the underlying firefox version is generally very easy.
I'm currently actually tracking the firefox beta channel because the frequent small updates are so easy to do.
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I've used it to add keymappings so that hints only apply to certain kinds of buttons on a page, e.g. https://github.com/RobertCraigie/dotfiles/blob/ecfd6f66e8a77...
I do plan on implementing as many motions as is feasible, but there are some intentional differences, e.g. `f` is used for hints instead of jump-to-char.
Is RPC from external processes possible with this? For example, calling the URL of the open tab, or a list of open tabs and their URLs and/or content? Or remote control a tab, navigating to other URLs, etc? This would be interesting for integrating it with other apps and scripts, and Firefox is somewhat lacking in that field.
How secure is this?
Firefox Sync does work!
RPC is not currently supported but I agree it would be pretty interesting, tweety[0] was recently shared with me and that looks like it'd be quite nice, although I haven't tried it yet.
So far the only divergence from Firefox that could impact security is evaluating the config file, so I've described how that is sandboxed in the security[1] docs but I'm not super happy with the contents of that docs page; anything else you'd like to see mentioned?
[0]: https://github.com/pomdtr/tweety
[1]: https://glide-browser.app/security
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I don't think it'll be possible to implement multi-cursor support through the config though unfortunately.
1. https://freeimage.host/i/KMQu3EQ 2. https://freeimage.host/i/KMQAJ9t
with glide you can also make keymaps:
glide.keymaps.set("normal", "gd", () => openOrFocus("docs.google.com/document", "https://docs.google.com"), { description: "Go Docs" });
so i can close a tab quickly in normal mode using: tx. then hit gd to open google docs as an example.
i do have a hidden bookmarks bar with a ton of junk and sites i rarely open, but it is there if i need to find something.
For anyone wanting to stick to stock Firefox ESR, I highly recommend checking out VimFX.
0: https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx
The big downside of VimFX compared to Glide is lack of Firefox internal API documentation. I've had to dig through Firefox source code several times to find out how to do things e.g. wrangle tabs that would have been easy to do with the WebExtensions APIs. The fact that Glide makes these APIs available in the config file is the part I'm most excited about.
I'm currently actually tracking the firefox beta channel because the frequent small updates are so easy to do.
I have been using Vimium[1] on Chrome which works ok.
1. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbai...