Vimperator

» see vimperator.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 14 November 2017 Mozilla released Firefox 57 and several thousand add-ons stopped working within the hour. Most were small conveniences and were rewritten within months. Vimperator could not be rewritten, because what it did was not permitted anymore by design. It did not decorate the browser. It removed the browser and put something else in its place.

Martin Stubenschrott started it in Vienna in 2007, for the population of people who spend the working day inside vim and find every other program clumsy by comparison. Installed, it stripped the window down to the page. No toolbar and no address bar, and no tab strip unless you called for it. A status line sat at the bottom in the place vim puts its own, and a colon opened a command prompt where you typed what you wanted to happen.

The famous part was link hinting. You pressed f and small numbered labels appeared over every link on the page. Typing a number opened that link. It sounds like a party trick and it is the single feature every keyboard browser since has copied, because it solves the actual problem: a mouse is a device for pointing at things whose position you have to find first, and a keyboard is a device for naming things.

I never ran it, and I am the demographic it was written for. That is the honest thing to record about Vimperator. Coding in a modal editor is one decision, made once, in an application where nobody watches you work. The browser was the machine everything else happened in, and giving up the mouse there meant giving it up in front of every website designed by somebody who assumed you had one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

Firefox in the XUL era was assembled out of the same technology as the pages it displayed, and an extension with the right permissions could rewrite any part of it. Vimperator used that completely. It kept a configuration file at.vimperatorrc and loaded plugins written in JavaScript. Any key could be bound to any command. There was a version for Thunderbird as well, called Muttator, which did the same thing to mail.

In 2011 several of the main developers, Doug Kearns and Kris Maglione among them, forked the project as Pentadactyl over disagreements about how the internals should be organized. Both continued for years afterward with overlapping user bases and an unresolved argument between them, which is the normal condition of software written by people who care about keyboard layouts.

~ the day it died ~

WebExtensions was the right decision and it killed the entire class. Mozilla needed a multi-process browser to stay competitive on speed and security, and the old extension model made that close to impossible, since add-ons reached into the browser's internals and broke on every release. The new interface was a defined set of APIs that a misbehaving add-on could not bring the browser down with. It also contained no way at all for an extension to replace the browser's own chrome, because permitting that was exactly the problem.

The last release, 3.16.0, came out on 1 February 2017, nine months before the deadline that everyone had known about since 2015. Nobody attempted a rewrite. The project's own front page stopped selling the product and turned into a directory of what to use instead, which is a more graceful ending than most software manages. It named the browser forks that kept the old extension system alive, and it named the WebExtensions imitations that could do the keyboard part while leaving the window alone.

~ what remains ~

Vimium and Tridactyl are both still maintained and both do link hinting on a browser they cannot otherwise touch. Standalone keyboard browsers went the other way and rebuilt the whole application around the idea, which is where qutebrowser came from. Neither approach gets back what Vimperator had, which was a mainstream browser with a mainstream rendering engine that had been made to behave like a text editor by an add-on you could uninstall.

That capability is gone from every current browser and it is not coming back. The trade was made openly and most people got the better half of it. The bill was paid by a small number of users who had built ten years of habit on a feature the platform never intended to offer.

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