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Comment by thePunisher | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about writing a new webbrowser with very limited functionality which could be used on secure networks, such as Tor. It would only support a limited subset of HTTP and HTML / CSS and HTML Video. No Javascript / frames or anything else that could impart the safety.

I've been meaning to pitch it to the Tor Project, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

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I think browser vendors need to provide more advanced controls for people who want it. Give us a whitelist mode where every feature besides base HTML is turned off, unless we explicitly add the site to our whitelist. I want checkboxes that say only these websites allow: cookies, javascript, images, css, etc.

No need to reinvent the wheel, the browsers are fine, but they open the floodgates by default. I think content providers have abused this to the point of breaking the web. Similar to the ad networks... abused it the point of absurdity, so now you are all permanently blocked, because you couldn't have any common decency. Block it all by default, whitelist what you want.

That sounds like Dillo using a TOR proxy. It's quite usable, but it's limited CSS-capabilities break more sites than the missing JS support does.

I was thinking of using this as a starting point:

https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=htmlrenderer

I love Dillo and its philosophy. It's snappy like few other (currently maintained) GUI applications. I wish there was an e-mail client with the same goals.

> I wish there was an e-mail client with the same goals.

I recommend giving Sylpheed a try.

Thanks for the tip. It seems to have improved since I last tried it.

It's definitely an alternative to text-based browsers if you need something dead simple. And it's fast enough to run on an old 486 if needed.

If you haven't yet, maybe take a look at NetSurf:

- HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1

- PNG, GIF, JPEG, SVG, and BMP

- HTTPS

Latest release earlier this week

http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

Nice. The only drawback I see is that it's written in C.

I think it's a great idea. Fresh start, clean and simple, just displaying HTML content.

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