experiences/interests in the new minimal browser BadWolf?

[licoti]

Hi all,

I'm curious if anyone has experience or interest in this new minimalist webkitGTK+ privacy oriented browser called "BadWolf" that's been getting good reviews lately.
Approx 1500 lines of code, native extensions, and javascript/images enable/disable buttons.
The dev is also the maintainer for his corresponding package in AUR.

BadWolf home: https://hacktivis.me/projects/badwolf
Distrotube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBWy1d-JE6A
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/hkdjcm/badwolf_a_minimalist_and_privacyoriented/


My initial thoughts: if it is sufficiently lightweight and significantly more stable than fifth.. then even if the project might fade out in half a year, we Might still get a good year (or more) usability from it.

[vinceASPECT]

not heard of it, but thanks.

v

 

[xor]

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

[nick65go]

I am also interested in browsers which respect user privacy. Because firefox-mozilla, google-chrome (big spy/titans) do not!

I wonder if TC12_x64 will have dillo 3.0.5 (with ssl) and badwolf 1.0.3. The cream of minimalism.
Both are in Alpine linux.But you must chroot in TC to run them, because both appls are linked with musl (not libc).

- Dillo was seen last time in TC11. It is very small, it depneds on fltk. Excelent for text browsing (on/off images).
- Unfortunatly Fifth (depends on FLTKWebkit) was seen last time in TC10.
- And BadWolf (depends on WebKitGTK ) is one of the best minimalist and privacy-oriented browser (works on youtube)

PS: But with Cloudflare DNS-over-TCP/HTTPS service (centralising all your DNS to one point), and Firefox in bed/love with Cloudflare, then even tor-browser is doomed. Cloudflare is the new censor/honeypot. Freedom is an utopia today.

[jazzbiker]

webkitfltk-dev.tcz was updated by Juanito at 2020/11/18. The only purpose of this extension (as far as I know) is to be linked with fifth browser...

[Juanito]

fifth is waiting on patches for openssl-1.1.1

badwolf(-1.0.3) is in the CorePure-11.x repo

[nick65go]

Regarding BadWolf browser, I expected to be minimalist by design, as author intended.
 But its size in TC11_x64 is over 109MB as tcz (so uncompressed). This is because it "is using"
adwaita-icon-theme.tcz   13225984,  12.61 MB
icu61.tcz                       13946880,  13.30 MB
icu65.tcz                       14299136,  13.64 MB !?
webkitgtk4.tcz                 23781376,  22.68 MB

All these 100 MB just for few (less than 10?) test-strings in menus and few icons. When the user just want a browser to navigate https sites with on/off options: javascript and images, and have audio/video/download with external programs.  How small is a web-browser static (no external libs) compiled?

I do not particularly care for this specific browser. But I wonder, in year 2021, is this the climax of optimization and minimal size for a modern browser? If yes, then I am disappointed by almost all linux distributions trends in bloated software.

[jazzbiker]

Hi, nick65go!

if talking about optimization in general we are searching for an extremum, and it can be minimum or maximum. Modern software is optimized for maximum size to comply with fixed standards (in case of browser html css JS and DOM, if I'm not missing any). Size of lynx.tcz with all deps is around 2M.
tcc.tcz is 120 K, gcc is 36 M.
Why are You so pessimistic and name this climax? I'm sure we'll see new shining tops very soon! Nobody would stop the progress! Keep smiling!

[nick65go]

Hi jazzbiker!
As we all are ageing, maybe we gradualy loose patience, so less tolerance for bullshit (in general).If I am not missleading, the web "standards" were not changed very much for "common users" confort.
 I mean I would like to do the same basic things on internet: secure online banking, reading text, see some static images, few movies or download them on /tmp or stream them, The audio/video container formats are near the same, and can be accesed by external special programs (ffmpeg, gstream?), downloaded (wget, curl). Next to nothing new here!

New is the fat/bloat in the last 12 years, from opera_9 to firefox_84;
 https://help.opera.com/en/operas-archived-history/
Waste of more and more resources (hardware and software), electricity, with zero impact to users.

[curaga]

That's how it goes. Web is massively bloated and to support everything means a lot of size. Try an older, decent-sized browser like Opera 9 and see that most sites are broken, because they want the latest JS, websockets, css animations, webgl...

[jazzbiker]

So the number of the standards to comply with is growing, sorry, being optimized too People really, really wants all this standards, they feel they can not live without all this wonderful toys! There must not exist any way to escape the happiness!

[Rich]

Hi curaga

... Try an older, decent-sized browser like Opera 9 and see that most sites are broken, because they want the latest JS, websockets, css animations, webgl...

You left out the big one, support for some of the security protocols. I'm running Opera 11.52 on this machine and I've
given up trying to connect to other websites due to messages like this:

Unable to complete secure transaction

You tried to access the address http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt,
which is currently unavailable. Please make sure that the web address (URL) is correctly spelled and
punctuated, then try reloading the page.

Secure connection: fatal error (70) from server.

https://mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt

Handshake failed because the server does not want to accept the enabled SSL/TLS protocol versions.

[curaga]

TLS 1.2 and 1.3 too, yes. Though if it links openssl dynamically, upgrading just openssl usually fixes that.

[Rich]

Hi curaga
No such luck. Running  ldd  on Opera shows no dependency on  openssl .

[PDP-8]

Just be sure to look behind the scenes for anything touting privacy, when looked at more closely, used dns-over-http, mitm sites, Cloudflare etc and privacy policies.

Yeah, it's a mess.  These days the best I do is with Firefox-ESR, and a handful of extensions.  Careful pruning of options and/or a policies.json file too.  But that's just me.

Have a gander at what Unixsheik has to say: (purposely using just enough html...)

https://unixsheikh.com/articles/choose-your-browser-carefully.html

So think carefully before just jumping onto the privacy thing without delving deeper..