i3 is genuinely the best WM out there...I highly prefer that WM approach to the classical DE approach. For several reasons I find myself now using Gnome and no tiling at all and it's painful XD. With i3 you push yourself to minimizing the amount of time spent in GUI and maximizing the terminal usage...that helps a lot to learn exponentially. That's why I like i3.

With regards to qutebrowser, have you tried it?