Xxxterm, a minimalist web browser | Hacker News Reader

Xxxterm, a minimalist web browser

opensource.conformal.com

59 pointsmboroi25 comments

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If you like Xxxterm but feel like it isn't quite your cup of tea, try one of these other similar alternate web browsers:

- Luakit: http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/ My favourite in this list. Just webkit + lightweight lua shell. Infinitely customizable.

- Surf: http://surf.suckless.org/ From the same people who created wmii and dwm

- Uzbl: http://uzbl.org/ Haven't had much luck with this one, but it's quite interesting. A while back, there was some work into getting this to play nice with emacs (google: Ezbl)

If you want vim-like browser, try Pentadactyl: http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/

You can mappings, like this one, which will take you from a comments page on Hacker News to the actual article:

:autocmd LocationChange news.ycombinator.com map g1 :js openUILinkIn($(".title a")[0], "current")<CR>

From https://github.com/aantn/castle/blob/master/home/.pentadacty...

Nice tip.

At one point I used and loved Vimperator and then migrated to Pentadactyl, but ultimately got fed up with Firefox's bloat and memory management issues.

Same. I sadly used Chrome to post that comment, but I'll be back one day.

I'd recommend checking out Firefox Aurora (http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/aurora/) - Firefox is really looking great these day. The new native developer tools are coming along nicely and hopefully will prove more stable than Firebug.

There's an Arch Linux dev that maintains a custom repo with Aurora builds and matching Aurora Pentadactyl packages in the AUR, for those on the distro.

A quick search on "Heftig Repo" should bring up the correct results, and the BBS thread is here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117157

i've seen a similar post several times, perhaps i should start suggesting usage of xxxterm every time i see one of these other browsers suggested :-P

Is there a configuration for this browser, or another micro-browser, which has anti-tracking, anti-social, adblock and flashblock built in?

Would be cool to store the history outside of the browser, in a kind of standard format. Im not sure if it is easy enough to extract firefox history from its sqlite3 db. It would also be cool to switch where to store history/activitiy very fast, for example "send to home computer" or save for later synching with your other browsing profile...

> Im not sure if it is easy enough to extract firefox history from its sqlite3 db

install http://code.google.com/p/sqlite-manager/ point it to history file in you profile directory

> It would also be cool to switch

there is sync built in. anyone know a good library for accessing? pref python.

edit: when i say i want a library i mean a client library for accessing data stored on sync server. want to build a page that displays my bookmarks.

Something like Mozilla Weave: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Weave ?

sqlite3 isn't that hard to work with, you know; for example, I only spent an hour or two writing a script to extract recently visited URLs from Firefox (http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#browser-history) and I don't even know SQL.

have a look at the reply i made to the other post about adsuck ( https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck ). it blocks all kinds of scripts and malware via DNS proxying.

Despite the name, xxxterm is not a cli web browser. If you clicked looking to browse the internet in your terminal, try w3m. It also has vi shortcuts.

I presume that despite the name it's also not full of porn or violence.

But [TheInternetIsForPron](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheInternetIsForP...)

xterm is for text, xxxterm is for porn.

For a browser that seems to be built with security and privacy as top priorities, it seems to be missing some obvious features. How do you allow first-party scripts and cookies while still blocking third-party scripts and cookies? Does it support surrogate scripts like NoScript does, to deal with sites that actively try not to work when you block ads and tracking scripts? Where's the AdBlock-style blacklist?

we have another project, adsuck ( https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck ), that blocks ads via DNS proxying. it can be setup to proxy DNS requests for a single host, e.g. a laptop, or on a network perimeter, e.g. a firewall, and it works by using blacklists to map DNS requests for 'bad' sites to return a NXDOMAIN. this way the ad images and their associated js are never downloaded or executed. see http://rlwpx.free.fr/WPFF/hosts.htm for more info about the blacklists.

you're right to point out that there is not yet a way to separate 1st and 3rd party scripts, but the cookies are handled by the xxxterm.conf setting

cookie_policy = no3rdparty

there is no handling for surrogate scripts atm. i can say that i personally don't bother with sites that require advertisements for viewing but i can understand the desire to do so.

feel free to post feature requests or bugs at https://opensource.conformal.com/flyspray/index.php?project=... .

A blanket ban on third-party cookies or third-party scripts is not enough. You need to be able to specify which third-party domains are trusted. There are lots of decent sites that need to be able to load assets from a different domain in order to be functional, but which also like to load Google Analytics, or set cookies from Omniture (2o7.net). These aren't ads, but are still things I'd like to block.

Many sites also break if you don't load GA, hence the need for surrogate scripts. If you dismiss and don't try to support the secure use of sites that exhibit any of the above behavior, then your browser doesn't have anything to offer users that care about privacy and security. Privacy doesn't have to be the antithesis of compatibility.

DNS blacklisting is useful and has its place, but I would expect a secure-by-default browser to not load any resources from domains outside the one in the requested URL (like lynx) and to provide a simple way to selectively whitelist external resources for that domain only (like the RequestPolicy Firefox extension). That's one important omission from your otherwise impressive list of features that will probably make me stick with Firefox + Vimperator + RequestPolicy.

Lynx. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) This is the most minimal browser I've ever used. It doesn't even have javascript. A lot of the web isn't supported on it due to the lack of javascript support.

heh, am a fan of lynx since it's in openbsd's base install.

"what do you mean your site isn't optimized for viewing with lynx!?!"

the link seems to be dead

For the lazy people: http://freecode.com/projects/xxxterm (Google Search, second result)

same for me, A brief google turned up this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/2011-10-1...

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