Advice on browser for LFS: can't face Firefox any more!
 

I have used Firefox on all my LFS builds from the year dot. I also use it in Crux and Debian. But I just can't face building all those dependencies any more. Now it needs gtk3 and gtk2, as well as rust.

I love graphical Links, but it doesn't do javascript and a lot of sites now depend on that. Chromium seems to pull in most of gnome.

Can someone suggest something that is small, fast, not too many dependencies and compatible with modern sites. Ideally one that stores passwords too. I'm leaning towards Midori at the moment.

Pale Moon?

Plus one.

https://www.palemoon.org/

Yes, Palemoon looks interesting, Firefox without the flab. But installing it as a binary seems contrary to the spirit of LFS. I could just as well install Firefox as a binary and save myself the build.

I wonder if I could build it locally from source. This is discouraged by the Palemoon devs, and the only instructions they are prepared to give are for Windows, but I could try doing it with the LFS version of the mozconfig file and then disable anything that causes trouble.

I had no trouble building Pale Moon from source, I was even using newer compiler than suggested.

I'd be interested to see your mozconfig file. This page shows the one that BLFS uses for Firefox.

I remember now, it was a few moths ago, yes I did something to mozconfig ... it is all gone by now.

I agree. I'm going to give it a whirl.

Just blundering around I found the following pages:
https://developer.palemoon.org/Devel...ozconfig_Files
https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon

you can find good advice on how to build it in the PKGBUILDs:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/palemoon/
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/palemoon-26/

i might also recommend https://surf.suckless.org/ or qupzilla or dwb (though i'm never quite sure whether dwb is dead or still maintained).

No luck so far with Pale Moon. I downloaded the latest version and tried to build it by hand using a mozconfig provided by LFS. To my surprise, it broke during the build with what looked to me like an error in the actual code. I'm attaching the relevant bit of the build output for anyone who is interested. So I tried an automated build package with scripts that I found somewhere and tried to use it with older versions, thinking that they were likely to be more stable. Version 27.0 failed to configure correctly (for some reason it failed to recognise my lcms2) but 27.1 went like the clappers until it broke at precisely the same point as before.

The annoying thing is that the bad code seems to be for a battery manager and why the hell would a browser need one of those? I always thought battery management was the job of the OS. And anyway, my computer runs off the mains. I went carefully through the ./configure --help output to see if I could disable the battery manager but I couldn't find an option for doing that.

So I think I'll build webkit instead. That will give me a choice of several browsers including the suckless one which I would certainly like to try.

PS: I found this article by the mozilla team on the battery manager. They don't seem to have a very high opinion of it either.

Oh no! I looked at webkitgtk and it's a monstrosity, much bigger than xulrunner. Like Firefox, it need both varieties of gtk (and ruby too I think) and it takes about 12 hours to build. So midori is out and probably surf too.

I took a look at dillo, which I remember as being quite small. It's based on fltk, which is much smaller than gtk. It does javascript but isn't very strong on https: certificates are not authenticated, just checked to ensure they haven't changed. That certainly wouldn't work on google, which changes its certificates all the time. Maybe that's why AntiX uses it as a help reader but not as a browser.

However browsing around I found something called fifth, which is said to be fast and small. It uses the fltk version of webkit; if I can find that, I'll take a look at it. Otherwise I seem to be stuck with either a monstrous amount of building (Firefox, webkitgtk), a binary import (which in LFS seems like cheating), or a browser that doesn't do all I want.

For some years now LFS has been my primary distro. But if I can't get a fully-functional browser set up in it without having to build and install all kinds of cruft, I might as well go back to using Crux or Debian most of the time.

I just cloned Pale Moon sources (git) and built successfully. First it failed with gcc-7.2 and gold linker. Had no problem with gcc-5.4 and BFD linker. I did not use .mozconfig this time and the only configure option was --disable-pulseaudio.

Running it gives Version: 27.6.0a1 (64-bit) (2017-09-17)

How on earth do you build a mozilla program without a mozconfig file? I've never done it that way.

I don't use gold (why use a new linker when I've never had any problems with the old one), but the native gcc on this version of LFS is 7.2. I suppose I could build an earlier version, but it seems too much like hard work.

Right now I'm exploring webkit-fltk. My first build failed because of a dependency on xslt; no configure script on this project so you have to find out about missing dependencies the hard way! I'll install it and try again.

I happened to read build instructions, somewhere there they said "if you use .mozconfig". This made me think it is not mandatory. Anyhow, looking inside of .mozconig there are just configuration options. I figure I need it only when I want to set something different than defaults.

In any case, my Pale Moon works.

Edit: I like it! I even didn't install it, I run it as ~/work/Pale-Moon/build/dist/bin/palemoon-bin. It plays sound in HTML-5 using plain ALSA. It is snappy.

OK, I'm a good boy now, can I have a pat on the back, please?