another nice web browser

Today, I installed the QupZilla web browser in Bridge Linux, from the Arch Linux Community repos (it's also available in Debian Testing and Debian Sid). QupZilla is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac; see their "Download" page for more info.

Here's what I saw when I first fired it up, right after I installed it:

The search window in the QupZilla start page uses DuckDuckGo. Nice.

The first thing I did was to import my Chromium bookmarks (File > Import bookmarks...). This went very slowly, then seemed to stop at 98%:

I tried importing the bookmarks again. This time, it stopped at 99% and never finished. I think that it got hung up on importing the bookmark icons because the bookmarks themselves actually did get imported.

Unfortunately, the bookmark folders don't get imported along with the bookmarks -- you just end up with a list of bookmarks. In my case, it was a very long list. I decided that this wasn't too much of a problem. I could go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks and create my own folders and drag bookmarks into them. Better yet, the address bar, which can be set to search using the default search engine, can also be set to show suggestions from history as well as from bookmarks, in effect giving me easy access to all of my imported bookmarks:

After being used to Chromium's Omnibar, I see no point in having a web search bar along with an address bar, so I removed the web search bar (Edit > Preferences > Appearance > Advanced Options > uncheck the box next to "Show web search bar").

QupZilla comes with an ad blocker and a flash blocker, and those seem to work fine.

There isn't much in the way of extensions/add-ons, so I saw no way of adding something like Forecastfox, for example:

I like the Speed Dial on the New Tab page:

QupZilla's interface is set up kinda like Firefox's, so there's a little less space in the browsing window than there is in Chromium. But I didn't have much problem getting used to QupZilla, and I found myself trying to come up with reasons why I shouldn't use it as my main web browser, because it actually seems quite nice. I came up with one major reason: I several different distros across my four computers; I need a way to sync my browser bookmarks (I use Xmarks), and I see no way to do that in QupZilla. So, for now, I'll continue to play around with QupZilla in Bridge Linux only, and I'll see how this browser develops over time.