Keyboard Centric
Qutebrowser is the ideal web browser for the keyboard enthusiast. It uses a hotkey scheme and command mode inspired by the popular modal text editor, Vim. It takes some time to learn but it quickly becomes second nature. For the new user I highly suggest learning the basics of Vim via the Vim tutor. A foundation in Vim makes the logic of the browser more accessible.
Free
Qutebrowser is powerful free software. Its distributed under the GPL v3.0, and It competes favorably against the more proprietary browser projects. In fact, in many ways it is more powerful. It doesn’t remove features to funnel you into the snares of advertisers and data collectors. It doesn’t come with anti-features. Ultimately, Qutebrowser respects its user out of the box.
Portable & Python
Qutebrowser is portable and written in Python. It’s configure with a plain-text python file. This makes a prefect compliment for the Qtile window manager. Python is an interpreted language and the browser does run slower than other browsers written in compiled languages. Despite this limitation I have noticed a decrease in start up times in recent versions.
Qutebrowser recently implemented a new ad-blocking system in version 2.0. It uses Brave’s add blocking engine with a wrapper translating the rust from Brave to python. It works well for some pages but struggles with things like video ads on larger web platforms.
Minimal, Beautiful
Less is more and Qutebrowser gives you the bare minimum. When you start Qutebrowser you get a window that loads web pages. There are no buttons or noisy widgets, only a title bar and a url bar. However, you can do pretty much whatever you could think of with the given elements.
Mutable
QuteBrowser is a free and open source project, and it needs contribution. New features are added frequently, and in the end you can have an impact on the direction of the project if you want to get involved.
Important
Qutebrowser is an important browser for one main reason. Its different. There is not much difference between the major browsers. Their immense market share gives groups who don’t value the rights of their users undue sway over web standards. The fact that QuteBrowser uses the QT Web Engine instead of one of the web engines that dominate the marketplace makes it something to care about.