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