[qutebrowser] Happy birthday, qutebrowser!

[Richard Ottermanns]

Dear Florian,

happy birthday! I think everyone (who knows it) will agree that qutebrowser is one of the best pieces of software ever seen. And definitely the browser to go for. I have been struggling with dwb, uzbl and others for a long time and qutebrowser came as a true rescue. I am amazed how much ideas and power you and all the community have been spending since then. Thanks so much.

One thing that makes this project so special is the fact that it is always very close to the (command line loving) users. I hope that qutebrowser will always develop further, but stay close to its "less is more" philosophy.

Thanks a lot and keep on coding
Richard

On 14.Dec.18 09:38, Florian Bruhin wrote:
> Heya!
> 
> 5 years ago today, this happened:
> 
>   commit 11a94957dc038fc27c5ff976197ad2b2d0352d20
>   Author: Florian Bruhin <git at the-compiler.org>
>   Date:   Sat Dec 14 22:15:16 2013 +0100
>   
>       Initial commit
> 
> That's how qutebrowser looked a day after that (and that commit still
> seems to run!): https://imgur.com/a/xoG1r4G
> 
> Exactly a year later, things were finally ready for a v0.1 release,
> after spending two weeks of holidays with fixing bugs.
> 
> Originally, qutebrowser was born because the dwb project was
> discontinued: https://portix.bitbucket.io/dwb/
> 
> That's what I (and many others) were using at the time, and all
> alternatives were stuck with an unmaintained WebKit1. Since everything
> was using WebKitGTK which was horribly buggy (and WebKit2 in WebKitGTK
> lacked a lot of basic features), I decided to start my own thing, based
> on Qt instead.
> 
> Back then, there were already discussions about QtWebEngine, and I
> originally wondered whether I should just wait with starting qutebrowser
> until it's ready. QtWebEngine support was finally added in July 2016, a
> lot later than I imagined. Initially, many features didn't work yet, but
> in September 2017 it finally became the default backend.
> 
> Later, it turned out that qutebrowser also was a viable alternative for
> many Pentadactyl/Vimperator refugees, and qutebrowser got more popular
> than I ever imagined.
> 
> So far, there have been:
> 
> - 17,227 commits
> -  3,193 issues
> -  1,273 pull requests
> -    242 contributors
> -     47 releases
> -      2 crowdfundings
> - dozens of t-shirts
> - thousands of stickers
> 
> Thanks a lot to the whole community - y'all are awesome! I never
> imagined I would be working on this for so long, or that it'd gain so
> much traction. I also didn't believe the crowdfunding thing would work.
> You showed me otherwise \o/
> 
> Some 3-4 years ago, I noticed there were a couple of big things I'll be
> busy with for a while:
> 
> - Adding a testsuite because things broke a lot
> - QtWebEngine
> - The new config system
> - An extension API
> 
> I'm currently working on the fourth one. Not many new very big tasks
> have appeared (except maybe a testsuite which isn't as unreliable and
> slow, and some refactorings to keep my sanity when working on the code).
> 
> I'm really looking forward to the point where I can work on smaller
> things (and new features) again - for a long time, most of my time was
> spent reviewing contributions, fixing bugs, putting out fires with Qt
> upgrades, and working on those four major things.
> 
> Florian
> 
> -- 
> https://www.qutebrowser.org | me at the-compiler.org (Mail/XMPP)
>    GPG: 916E B0C8 FD55 A072 | https://the-compiler.org/pubkey.asc
>          I love long mails! | https://email.is-not-s.ms/



-- 

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***
Dr.rer.nat. Dipl.-Ing.
Richard Ottermanns
Institute for Environmental Research (Biology V)
Chair of Environmental Biology and Chemodynamics (UBC)
RWTH Aachen University
Worringerweg 1
D-52074 Aachen
Germany

Phone:  +49-241-8026688
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e-mail: ottermanns(at)bio5(dot)rwth-aachen(dot)de
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