I'm just in the same task, I think we are better looking for the Ark of the Covenant, it's more likely to exists, I used qutebrowser for a while, it's almost perfect but what it lacks make it crappy for me (no way to effectively filter content and after a while start using more memory than Firefox, with less features), I tried Dillo, really minimal, is annoying to get it working with SSL, yea, in 2020. Really minimal the closest to usable is links2, but doesn't support JS at all, and many sites don't work at all without it, my solution is to spread and leave the least possible in the browser, where is the thing. I'm asuming Linux here, if you are using Windows getting "minimal" makes no sense, is like losing weight putting less strawberries to your chocolate cake.
1) Embrace RSS/Atom, you can find clients really lightweight, newsboat on the CLI or liferea with a minimal GUI. there you put your github watched projects, reddit, news sites, hell even yout YT subscriptions.
2) Hell with YT videos in the browser, use the browser just to browse :) browser, browser, browser. With youtube-dl you can download videos and playlists and if you add mpv you just play the urls and on the background youtube-dl make the magic ;)
3) Get a really minimal browser to minimal tasks, I usually had 10+ tabs just with documentations open, maybe some githubs, simple stuff that most of the time even works without JS, for that I use vanilla surf, it sucks, is slow, does nothing but for lighweight sites is not that relevant, no tabs? who cares is just to check things quickly, in and out. Because suckless patches often fail to compile, and to hell with bookmarks, I just made a simple html with my bookmarks and added to my keybinding of surf, so it loads when I start surf, no need to export bookmarks or anything, just a good old
with links, a couple of lines of CSS and is even dark mode for your bookmarks (and is multi-browser ;) ).
4) For the few things that need a full featured browser, use Firefox, because, let's face it is the only choice, unless you want to eat all your RAM with webkit, by the way, that "magic" that makes Chrome a bit faster is mostly prefetch, which is not to good for the privacy minded. Afte a while you'll notice that the cites that really require a big browser are very few.
Is not a perfect solution but works for me, I like RSS, is also less distracting and really fast and light, and doesn't track you :) and whenever I need to check the Rust docs for example, I just open surf and use my bookmark home page, 2 keys and a click and I'm there. Dillo and links can also work for that, sadly the searches in the Rust docs use JS so links is not enough, other than that is perfect, wikis? perfect wordreference, simple sites that work without JS, links is perfect, it has bookmarks but even with them it weights only 6MB installed, Dillo is also great, if it comes with SSL enabled (has to be compiled with the option and for some reason in Gentoo the flag doesn't work and I don't want to spend time fixing that) is great, even kinda good looking. w3m is annoying to work with, elinks seems to be abandoned, lynx, meh, didn't like it either. Maybe Midori, Falkon, Netsurf or Gnome browser, could work too. I hope it helps, I think I've found a perfect tool for everything I nedd, except the browser, is annoying, I understand your pain.
I really like RSS and use it in my daily life for blogs and etc. But I don't really like the idea of waiting the inital download for youtube since where I live internet is pretty slow.
I'll try out the way you consume internet tho, maybe I'll set something up as to consume video trough a video player on my computer or something. That way, I really lower my dependency on browser for anything.
Let's see how that goes, thank you.
by the way, when you use youtube-dl on its own, you have to download the entire video, but whey you use it through mpv it plays while downloading, just like with the browser, it plays "real time", with the added bonus that you don't get the adds (extra bandwidth and delay), you don't waste also with the whole youtube site loeading, just the video, you can also ask the specific format you want or a range of quality. Is also less CPU/GPU intensive, mpv is much more efficient than the browser media player and because you only load the video (without the rest of the YT site) the video actually start playing faster this way ;)
I'm just in the same task, I think we are better looking for the Ark of the Covenant, it's more likely to exists, I used qutebrowser for a while, it's almost perfect but what it lacks make it crappy for me (no way to effectively filter content and after a while start using more memory than Firefox, with less features), I tried Dillo, really minimal, is annoying to get it working with SSL, yea, in 2020. Really minimal the closest to usable is links2, but doesn't support JS at all, and many sites don't work at all without it, my solution is to spread and leave the least possible in the browser, where is the thing. I'm asuming Linux here, if you are using Windows getting "minimal" makes no sense, is like losing weight putting less strawberries to your chocolate cake.
1) Embrace RSS/Atom, you can find clients really lightweight, newsboat on the CLI or liferea with a minimal GUI. there you put your github watched projects, reddit, news sites, hell even yout YT subscriptions.
2) Hell with YT videos in the browser, use the browser just to browse :) browser, browser, browser. With youtube-dl you can download videos and playlists and if you add mpv you just play the urls and on the background youtube-dl make the magic ;)
3) Get a really minimal browser to minimal tasks, I usually had 10+ tabs just with documentations open, maybe some githubs, simple stuff that most of the time even works without JS, for that I use vanilla surf, it sucks, is slow, does nothing but for lighweight sites is not that relevant, no tabs? who cares is just to check things quickly, in and out. Because suckless patches often fail to compile, and to hell with bookmarks, I just made a simple html with my bookmarks and added to my keybinding of surf, so it loads when I start surf, no need to export bookmarks or anything, just a good old
with links, a couple of lines of CSS and is even dark mode for your bookmarks (and is multi-browser ;) ).
4) For the few things that need a full featured browser, use Firefox, because, let's face it is the only choice, unless you want to eat all your RAM with webkit, by the way, that "magic" that makes Chrome a bit faster is mostly prefetch, which is not to good for the privacy minded. Afte a while you'll notice that the cites that really require a big browser are very few.
Is not a perfect solution but works for me, I like RSS, is also less distracting and really fast and light, and doesn't track you :) and whenever I need to check the Rust docs for example, I just open surf and use my bookmark home page, 2 keys and a click and I'm there. Dillo and links can also work for that, sadly the searches in the Rust docs use JS so links is not enough, other than that is perfect, wikis? perfect wordreference, simple sites that work without JS, links is perfect, it has bookmarks but even with them it weights only 6MB installed, Dillo is also great, if it comes with SSL enabled (has to be compiled with the option and for some reason in Gentoo the flag doesn't work and I don't want to spend time fixing that) is great, even kinda good looking. w3m is annoying to work with, elinks seems to be abandoned, lynx, meh, didn't like it either. Maybe Midori, Falkon, Netsurf or Gnome browser, could work too. I hope it helps, I think I've found a perfect tool for everything I nedd, except the browser, is annoying, I understand your pain.
I really like RSS and use it in my daily life for blogs and etc. But I don't really like the idea of waiting the inital download for youtube since where I live internet is pretty slow.
I'll try out the way you consume internet tho, maybe I'll set something up as to consume video trough a video player on my computer or something. That way, I really lower my dependency on browser for anything.
Let's see how that goes, thank you.
by the way, when you use youtube-dl on its own, you have to download the entire video, but whey you use it through mpv it plays while downloading, just like with the browser, it plays "real time", with the added bonus that you don't get the adds (extra bandwidth and delay), you don't waste also with the whole youtube site loeading, just the video, you can also ask the specific format you want or a range of quality. Is also less CPU/GPU intensive, mpv is much more efficient than the browser media player and because you only load the video (without the rest of the YT site) the video actually start playing faster this way ;)
Yep, I really gotta get that set up ASAP. That's probably what I'm missing from my browser setup.