badwolf

BadWolf

Minimalist and privacy-oriented WebKitGTK+ browser.

Homepage: https://hacktivis.me/projects/badwolf

Copyright © 2019-2021 Badwolf Authors <https://hacktivis.me/projects/badwolf>
SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause

The name is a reference to BBC’s Doctor Who Tv serie, I took it simply because I wanted to have a specie in the name, like some other web browsers do, but doesn’t go into the “gentle” zone.

Differencies

Comparing from other small WebKit browsers for unixes found in the wild:

• Independent of environment, should just work if GTK and WebKitGTK does
• Storing data should be:
  • explicit and optionnal (ie. Applying preferences doesn't imply Saving to disk)
  • not queryabe by WebKit (so the web can't use it)
  • done in a standard format (like XBEL for bookmarks)
• Static UI, no element should be added at runtime, this is to avoid potential tracking via viewport changes
• Small codebase, should be possible to read and understand it completely over an afternoon.
• Does not use modal editing (from vi) as that was designed for editing, not browsing
• UTF-8 encoding by default

Motivation from other clients https://hacktivis.me/articles/www-client%20are%20broken

Contributing

Translations

You need to have gettext installed. If you want a GUI, poedit exists and Weblate is a good web platform that I might consider hosting at some point.

• Syncing POT file with the source code: make po/messages.pot
• Syncing PO file with the POT file: make po/de.po
• Initialising a new PO file (example for German, de_DE): msginit -l de_DE -i po/messages.pot -o po/de.po

Contacts / Discussions

• IRC: #badwolf-browser on GeekNode
• Matrix (bridge): #badwolf-browser:matrix.fdn.fr

Repositories

git

• Main: https://hacktivis.me/git/badwolf/, git://hacktivis.me/git/badwolf.git
• Mirror: https://gitlab.com/lanodan/badWolf.git, this one can also be used if you prefer tickets/PRs over emails

release assets

• Main: https://hacktivis.me/releases/

• Mirror: https://gitlab.com/lanodan/badWolf/tags

• *.tar.* files are tarballs archives to be extracted with a program like tar(1), GNU tar and LibArchive bsdtar are known to work.

• *.sig files are OpenPGP signatures done with my key(DDC9 237C 14CF 6F4D D847 F6B3 90D9 3ACC FEFF 61AE).

• *.sign files are minisign (OpenBSD signify(1) compatible) signatures, they key used for it can be found at https://hacktivis.me/releases/signify/ as well as other places (feel free to ping me to get it)

Manual Installation

Dependencies are:

• POSIX-compatible Shell (ie. mrsh, dash, lksh)
• C11 Compiler (such as clang or gcc)
• WebKitGTK, only the latest stable(2.32.0+) is supported
• libxml-2.0, no known version limitation
• POSIX make with extension for shell in variables (works with GNU, {Net,Free,Open}BSD)
• A pkg-config implementation (pkgconf is recommended)
• (optional) gettext implementation (such as GNU Gettext)
• (optional, test) mandoc (the command) for linting the manpage

Compilation is done with ./configure && make, install with make install (DESTDIR and PREFIX environment variables are supported, amongs other common ones). An example AppArmor profile is provided at usr.bin.badwolf, please do some long runtime checks before shipping it or a modified version, help can be provided but with no support.

You'll also need inkscape (command line only) if you want to regenerate the icons, for example after modifying them or adding a new size. These aren't needed for normal installation as it is bundled.

Notes

Most of the privacy/security stuff will be done with patches against WebKit as quite a lot isn’t into WebKitSettings and with generic WebKit extensions that should be resuseable.