www-client are broken

So after saying that Mozilla is Broken (it still is). Chrom* became broken too :

• Doesn’t compile without black magic (also it takes at least 5+ hours)
• Now depends on Node.JS/NPM, which I can’t use as it depends on OpenSSL (I use LibreSSL, note that google got BoringSSL) and that I don’t want. (I prefer to avoid any javascript)
• The provided source tarballs includes third-party code and doesn’t compile with removing it (yeah, the broken "let’s put every dependency in the tarball" is also a thing at Google)

Basically I have no web browser anymore… or well no. I have even more web browser installed than when I was doing/learning web development, because I have several whatever around engines.

Anyway let’s put what I need in a web browser:

• Unicode by default (or at least follow my LANG environment variable or make it configurable)
• Full Libre software
• Compiles and works without systemd and pulseaudio, works with LibreSSL, bonus if no dbus hard-dependency.
• Privacy/Security:
  • No calling home without prior free consent(i.e. health report, search suggestions)
  • No proxying/DNS over Whatever/Auto-VPN/… without configurability
  • Does not implements their own crypto and supports current best practices/algorithms
  • per-domain blocking of requests by their type(cookies,css,images,media,xhr,scripts,…) and domain (as seen in uMatrix)
  • blocking of request by their URL (as seen in uBlock)
  • Bonus: Certificate fingerprint(like (TOFU of SSH(know-hosts)) and Certificate Patrol)
  • Bonus: Hook(able) to pass
• Deep(ciphers, headers, …) & understandable configuration (Mozilla Firefox being the worst, Opera-like browser being the best, another good example is linux menuconfig)
• Supports: HTML 5, CSS 3, Images(PNG, JPEG, SVG), Bonus: javascript(So I don’t need another browser)
• Uses dependencies/libraries but doesn’t eat them (I don’t like having to do: rm -fr third-party; ./configure --enable-system… --with-system…)
• Does not eat up all the RAM/CPU for nothing or freezes/crashes for whatever reason (but I think multiprocess à la chrom* is great when there is JS support and the overhead is ok)

As my findings of 2017-07-06, the web browsers (Gui;engine;style/inspiration) that are almost compliant to my needs are, without much sorting/ordering:

• Fifth (FLTK;FLTKWebkit;Unix+opera)
• Otter-Browser (QT+;QtWebkit+QtWebEngine;opera)
• GNU IceCat (GTK;Mozilla)
• Seamonkey (GTK;Mozilla;netscape-opera)
• Palemoon (GTK;?Mozilla) (Haven’t managed to build it after about a week…)
• qupzilla (Xlib+Qt;QtWebkit; scriptable TUI-like)
• uzbl / dwb (Xlib+GTK;WebkitGTK;scriptable TUI-like)
• Netsurf (GTK2+/Framebuffer/…;own+duktape;original?)

Changes

• 2018-08-24T22:10:58Z: Add "No proxying/DNS over Whatever/Auto-VPN/… without configurability"

published on 2017-07-09T02:01:46Z, last updated on 2020-08-13T21:27:00Z