Guest post by There are a lot of browsers these days, some being bloated with features, others serving the bare minimum of web browsing tasks. Marco Peerboom began developing his minimalist web browser xxxterm for OpenBSD in 2010. Within a year the browser became popular enough in the OpenBSD community to find its ways to major Linux repositories. And here’s why.
The minimalist web browser landscape
Regardless of the overall amount of browsers, the really minimalist ones are rare. The most notable ones in this category are:
- surf is a bare minimum web browser (though one may think it’s even less then minimal). It originated in the suckless.org community, which is a sufficient description as it is. Its features beyond those of WebKit are just XEmbedd support and URL export via XProperties. Every aspect of its customization must be tuned at compile time, though there is not much to tune. Although it has its user base, even the most hardcore geeks would think twice before using it as the only browser on their system.
- Uzbl is a sort of building kit. The package includes the uzbl-core (a set of wrappers for WebKit) and the browser, which is easily tunable to become whatever you want, but not unless you set it up to use extensions, or write your own in python. While being incredibly flexible, it needs to be configured, and this process takes quite some time.
- Dillo is probably the most lightweight browser to date, but it is barely useful on the present day web, as its web standards support resembles that of browsers back in 2000.
There are also Conkeror and Firefox with Vimperator extension which feel lightweight in their behavior, but is there still anybody who really believes that the words Gecko and lightweight belong in the same sentence?
The UNIX minimum pack
xxxterm provides a basic feature set. It supports bookmarks, tabbed browsing and location, search and status bars.
Beyond that it provides a gVim-like interface and vi-like controls including command and insert modes, a plaintext configuration file with the options in “option = value” format and links hinting (highlighting and numbering links, so that they can be followed by typing their numbers).
And like the other OpenBSD software it doesn’t require touching mouse.
Security
The goal the development of xxxterm effectively served, was to provide a lightweight yet secure alternative to major web browsers (like Firefox). While the “lightweight” part was achieved by dropping everything the developers didn’t want, the “secure” part was addressed more specifically.
xxxterm comes with flexible whitelisting capabilities: cookies, JavaScript and plug-in usage may be restricted to trusted sites, which can be specified in the respective entries of a configuration file. Though one can either globally enable or disable these features, the whitelist approach may be very desirable for those who easily get irritated with the amount of Flash, JavaScript and cookies on the web.
Conclusion
xxxterm feels home in minimalist setups. Its spartan UI won’t fit well into XFCE or GNOME (which is saddled with Firefox as the default browser for unknown reason these days), but will find its place among the xterm windows with 1 pixel borders. If your desktop looks like that, maybe you’re already reading this from xxxterm?
Before reading the article I thought it had something to do with Porn.
A web brower for porn surfers
Edited 2011-12-05 17:37 UTC
Isn’t that all of them?
I was about to say. I call my browser pron dispenser.
I surf all my porn in Opera.
Clever usage of browser meant for singers.
Porn in Opera:
“It ain’t over till the fat lady …”
Answers on a postcard to PO Box 123, Oslo. Winner gets two tickets to Wagner’s “The [####] Ring”.
Don’t forget http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/ luakit! It’s basically a minimal webkit/gtk front with a lua back.
Been using xxxterm for more than six months now… And, FWIW, it does HTML5 video better than Firefox and Chrome!
“There are also Conkeror and Firefox with Vimperator extension which feel lightweight in their behavior, but is there still anybody who really believes that the words Gecko and lightweight belong in the same sentence?”
Like, really?
Gecko for the record isn’t more bloated than webkit.
Firefox uses xul-runner for all the GUI which is what makes it feel slow at times (since you probably don’t know anything about nothing, xul is a javascript UI that is rendered by Gecko and is responsible for the slightly longer load time, UI delays and customizability)
And the article goes on and on with anti-Firefox claims which are all baseless. WTG OSnews.
I though it was about xxxterm, but instead, it was just good old FUD.
Edited 2011-12-05 20:54 UTC
Don’t You see a contradiction in Your words? Gecko is fast, but Firefox is slow because Gecko slowly renders it’s UI, optimised for Gecko.
Gecko is slow, bloated and full of moz-custom-option bloat.
Hey I like these introductions to new and useful or even interesting utilities. Keep it up guys.
But why the Firefox bashing in the conclusion, sounds allot more like personal bias than fact.
Is there a reason you don’t provide a link the browser’s website? (I know it is easy to find using a search engine, but you went through the trouble of linking all the other browsers you mention in passing.)
For anyone interested, the main site is:
https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xxxterm
Snapshots of source are at:
https://opensource.conformal.com/snapshots/xxxterm/
Now to get over the unfortunate choice of name and try this, otherwise interesting sounding piece of software out…
It’s not in the Debian repos, so it must not exist.
^lol
The Sid/Unstable repos have it, though.
Conformal apps rawk!! Currently typing this on xxxterm in scrotwm.
I’m running stable +backports, so I guess I’ll have to enable unstable to try it out. 🙁
Pentadactyl (formerly known as Vimperator) is an awesome web browsing experience. Combined with ratpoison, my happy fingers never have to leave my keyboard.
After all, what else would you use a MacBook for? 😉
Wow, this is exactly what I have been looking for. Thanks.
links -g anyone?
I’m using elinks at home and lynx at work. I can read osnews but for some reasons, I can not log in. I have to launch Opera just for commenting.
[quote]GNOME (which is saddled with Firefox as the default browser for unknown reason these days)[/quote]
It’s produced by a non-profit that is dedicated to FOSS ideals and an open web with the resources to improve the product.
Firefox is Firefox is Firefox regardless of the OS.
It has brand name recognition, and it won’t scare people away.
It’s recognized by web devs to be a browser to target, which isn’t the case for some other Web browsers.
Those are just some reasons off the top of my head. I’m sure other people can come up with more.
I’ll admit Firefox has it’s problems, but those problems aren’t enough to throw away the hard won recognition.
Dillo 3 is quite a big improvement over Dillo 2.x it now has floating table support which means webpages like google.com almost render normally and Facebook mobile will load if you enable ssl and cookie suppport!
It would be nice to see them add a plugin for javascript support.
do note that Dillo rejects cookies by default.
Thank you for sharing.
I used to use the light Hv3 (made in Tcl/Tk) a while back, I think Puppy introduced it to me.
http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html
However it looks like it might have been inactive a couple of years.