[NCLUG] [OT?] Vimium on Chromium on FreeBSD

[Bob Proulx]

Chad Perrin wrote:
> YakShave was actually created by someone who uses Viper Mode in Emacs,
> apparently, and is meant to suit his preferences.  Unfortunately, it does
> not appear to have any facility for selecting links the same way
> Vimperator and Vimium do, making it kind of pointless as far as I can
> tell.

I have looked at YakShave and it didn't quite all fall into place for
me.  The parts that wanted an editor server to edit your text area
inputs was just too deep in the yak shave stack.

> What confuses me more, though, is the fact that Vimium will not work
> on the Chrome extensions gallery either -- even though it uses a
> normal hypertext URL scheme.

That really says that somehow the gallery is handled specially in the
chromium code somewhere.

> Yeah, limitations in the extension system seem to be the biggest problem
> with Chromium.

Hopefully it will mature well.

> Similarly, while the EFF/Tor extension for Firefox called HTTPS
> Everywhere will operate securely, the Chromium equivalent called KB
> SSL will only redirect after the initial request has been sent,
> which means that stuff like cookie-stored login data will be sent in
> the clear before it redirects from HTTP to HTTPS.

Hmm...  That sounds like it isn't actually working.  Or needs
cooperation from the site.  On the site side of things that is a
common problem of saying, oh, it is an http access, redirect it to
https.  Of course by then the cookies and data have already been
exposed.  At least when the site does that the user will bookmark the
https URL and usually won't hit the http one again later.  The cookies
really need to be marked as ssl only cookies so that the browser won't
send them to an http URL.

> Some of these limitations strike me as misguided attempts at offering
> improved security.

Probably that is what they were thinking.  But it is still very
annoying.  The "New Tab" page is the one that is the most
problematic.  It makes me actually take my hands off the keyboard and
reach for the mouse.

> Considering the great work Google has done on the UI
> for Chrom[e|ium], I'd expect the cardinal sin of an inconsistent user
> experience as produced by inconsistent keybindings within a single
> application to rate pretty highly on the "to be fixed" priority list.

I think we do not match the target user audience.  I am sure the
target audience never thinks that h, j, k, l would be used as scroll
keys!  Most of them never take their hand off of the mouse, ever.  If
they have to type something in then it is too hard to use.

Bob