badwolf/README.md

BadWolf

SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2019-2022 Badwolf Authors <https://hacktivis.me/projects/badwolf>
SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause

Minimalist and privacy-oriented WebKitGTK+ browser.

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

The name is a reference to BBC's Doctor Who TV series, 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.

Differences

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 optional (i.e. 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: ninja po/messages.pot
• Syncing PO file with the POT file: ninja 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://git.sr.ht/~lanodan/badwolf

release assets

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

• Mirror: https://git.sr.ht/~lanodan/badwolf/refs

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

• *.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

• POSIX-compatible Shell (i.e. mrsh, dash, lksh)
• ninja or samurai
• A pkg-config implementation (pkgconf is recommended)
• C11 Compiler (such as clang or gcc)
• WebKitGTK, only the latest stable(2.32.0+) is supported
• libxml-2.0, no known version limitation
• (optional, translating) po4a to modify manpage translations
• (optional, translating) gettext implementation (such as GNU Gettext)
• (optional, translating) ed(1), the standard editor
• (optional, lint) mandoc (the command) for linting the manpage
• (optional, lint) shellcheck for linting the ./configure script
• (optional, lint) flawfinder for examining C source code for flaws
• (optional, lint) reuse for checking REUSE compliance

Note: Packagers can safely ignore the lint dependencies.

Compiling

./configure && ninja

Note: configure is a simple shell script (so not autotools) which supports variables like PREFIX.

Installing

ninja install
# DESTDIR is supported

Debian users will probably want to use checkinstall instead.

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.

If you modify the icons, you'll need inkscape (command line only), to regenerate the bitmap versions. It isn't needed for a normal installation as the bitmap icons are 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 reusable.