badwolf

BadWolf

Minimalist and privacy-oriented WebKitGTK+ browser.

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

Copyright © 2019-2020 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, right now we are under 1 500 lines total
• 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

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/release/signify/ as well as other places (feel free to ping me to get it)

Manual Installation

Dependencies are:

• C11 Compiler (such as clang or gcc)
• WebKitGTK, only the latest stable is supported
• POSIX make with extension for shell in variables (works with GNU, {Net,Free,Open}BSD)
• A pkg-config implementation (pkgconf is recommended)
• (optionnal) gettext implementation (such as GNU Gettext)

Compilation is done with make CC=${CC:-cc}, install with make install. An example AppArmor profile is provided at usr.bin.badwolf, please do runtime checks before deploying.

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.