Yeah I share the sentiment. Still just about the most acceptable alternative, in my opinion. I like SeaMonkey and Palemoon, but would much rather see a fresh new browser that worked as well as these, but without a corporate entity behind it. Yeah I know this is not very likely.

What are your criteria for "work as well as"? I've had similar thoughts, but we might have different notions of necessary feature-sets.

I was using "surf" for a while just to test it out. It has very few features, but those it has work quite well, and it is fairly stable too. If I were to develop a browser, it would be based on surf. There is a SlackBuild if you want to try it (sbo).

in that vein, qutebrowser is also very nice.
but one might argument that webkit is also backed by a corporate entity...

well then it's dillo or netsurf i guess.

I'm afraid I have very little knowledge of the web or networking in general. I would imagine it to be a nightmare of trying to parse and execute a mess of languages, sometimes with syntax errors, obfuscated code, or malicious intent, and trying to provide some semblance of security while doing that.

I have no need of things like Adobe Flash or any sort of media playback. Neither am I a fan of JavaScript, although most web sites are broken to various degrees without it. Including this one. I do not need things like an e-mail client, PDF reader, dishwasher, etc. in a browser either.

Thanks for the recommend. I'll check that one out as well.

Ah, that's just my personal dislike of such things. But as far as I know, webkit is a Google product, is it not? Google is the one I like the least among all of them.

I do use Dillo, and I do like it quite a bit. But it is quite limited in its current state, in my opinion. I use it for browsing HTML manuals mostly.

Interestingly enough, the browser arachne for FreeDOS is actually seriously impressive. And does what it does within the absurd limitations of that environment. Including supporting SVGA resolutions and displaying pictures, etc. It does not rely on a GUI toolkit, or a window manager. It does not even rely on a display driver. I have obviously not attempted to test it thoroughly, but if it can be done with that toolset, in a modern machine running Linux, I wonder how much of a performance increase could realistically be achieved.

Google contributes to WebKit, but afaik it's more an Apple thing than a Google thing, and there are a half-dozen other companies contributing development-hours to it as well. It's the rendering engine used by Safari. Google forked WebKit to make Blink for use in Chrome.

If corporate sponsorship of the underlying rendering engine is an issue, the engine could be forked, but then the development team would have to chase the never-ending churn of new html/css/javascript features and port over bugfixes and security patches from the original project codebase.

That would be a lot of work, and IMO limited developer-hours would be better spent on project-specific features and plugins. If we were to dip our fingers in the rendering engine at all, it would be to find and fix bugs not prioritized by the corporate devs (memory leaks frequently don't get priority, for instance, but they are of keen concern to me, and WebKit definitely has memory leaks).

Thanks for the info. I find most large projects incredibly convoluted and nearly impossible to follow. There are too many layers as it is. Just a pet peeve that we are able to accomplish so little with the monstrous resources of a modern desktop or laptop computer.

In any case, I am always glad to see new alternatives, especially in a category which is absolutely dominated by a handful of major players.

just for lulz i'm trying this in dosbox right now.
it starts up, looks impressively ugly, and unfortunately i don't know how to connect to the internet...

well written.
and that is how the corporations get to us despite being FOSS!

I mean, come on. This is a 16-bit segmented model program running on an OS from the 80s. It uses the WattCP drivers, but you do need a working packet driver in the first place to go online.

My point was that this program can do it with 1MB of memory, with almost no pre-existing libraries or code. I think the contrast to our systems today which can run an entire emulated i386 machine besides Firefox and a bunch of other programs should be obvious.

Arachne can render an HTML page with reasonable speed on a machine that is capable of compiling the Linux kernel (with Slackware's default config) in 24+ hours.

Firefox achieves slightly better performance on a machine which can do that in 6 minutes and a few seconds.

Looking at Arachne, the author is to be commended for doing so much with so little :-) I downloaded ASRC197 and poked around. The JS sources contain only stubs, but HTML.C hits the necessary highlights of basic page rendering in only 115KB of code!

In terms of functionality it ranks somewhere below lynx, but seems to provide everything you'd need for browsing static content, and could serve as a starting point for any number of low-footprint html rendering projects. I'm glad to see the author has broken his haitus and started development again. It will be interesting to see where this project goes :-)

I obviously do not use Arachne for any daily browsing, but it actually came with FreeDOS, and I was seriously impressed with it. Not enough to go into the code, as I have very little interest in browser technology to be honest.

So I reverted back to FF 52.4.0 ESR, sure it uses GTK2 , but now I find that performance is severely hindered when on a youtube livestream. So I guess I will be switching back to the latest stable non ESR version of FireFox.... *sigh*.

Pale Moon has become my default browser, but after installing all the 6 December updates to -current, it no longer runs and returns the error,

Any ideas?
Many Thanks.

Almost certainly this is the result of the icu4c upgrade.

You could try to make an ugly symlink but don't tell anyone that I suggested that.

Of course the real solution is to rebuild Pale Moon against the new icu4c.

I seen what you did here, Didier! :p

I think the second option is preferable. ;)

Have you tried the latest update? The last one until after the holidays.