Simple desktop Gemini Protocol client with bookmarks. Polished, fits well with any Linux desktop but especially GNOME. Fast, no frills. Does not appear to handle subscriptions, client certificates, or other âsmall webâ protocols like Lagrange (my favorite Gemini client) or Kristall do.
I was surprised to find that NetSurf is still around and being developed! Itâs another independent browser like Dillo that goes waaaay back (as you might guess from its website), but never caught on outside a small niche.
It is, however, fast and light â and while it doesnât support the full range of website capabilities that a modern Chromium, Gecko or WebKit browser does, itâs got some minimal JavaScript support (off by default) and can handle enough CSS to display older websites and sites that arenât too complex. (And unlike Dillo, it seems to handle emoji consistently on Linux!)
For the most part, sites that are still mainly documents tend to be readable at least (even if they donât look right), while sites that are mainly applicationsâŠwell, I canât even log into Nextcloud, Dropbox, or GMail even after enabling JavaScript. I can log into Wallabag and read saved articles, but canât add new ones. Flickr confuses it terribly, and it doesnât even know where to start with OpenStreetMap. My WordPress/ClassicPress theme (SemPress) displays fine, but I canât log into the dashboard.
Ironically, I couldnât sign up for the NetSurf users mailing list using NetSurf. The list provider thought I was a bot!
There are a few incomplete features that can be frustrating. For example, you can edit the name of a bookmark, but I havenât found a way to edit where it points to. I was really hoping I could use bookmarklets for a few things since there arenât any extensions.
Overall itâs a little more capable than Dillo, but a bit slower. Either would be good to keep on hand for low-spec hardware, with a more âmainstreamâ browser when you need it. (Falkonâs a good choice, since itâs light for a Chromium browser and available on most of the same platforms.)
The web would be more usable overall if more developers tested their sites in a browser like this one.
Availability
NetSurf started out on RISC-OS, and the ports to Linux/Unix, AmigaOS and Haiku are all active, though the Haiku port is missing a few features like being able to change settings (which means you canât turn on JavaScript). Debian still includes it in their native repository, and thereâs a Flatpak with the latest version for other Linux distros.
Customized Firefox, with an eye toward security and privacy. Follows the stable release channel so itâs usually up to date. (Waterfox follows the extended-support releases.) Differences seem to mostly be in default settings (like clearing site data when you close the browser), pre-installed uBlock Origin, plus some security hardening: primarily disabling or altering features that can leak data usable to identify your browser.
Upside: better privacy! From what I can tell, LibreWolf and Brave are comparable in terms of browsing privacy, but of course LibreWolf doesnât have Braveâs crypto, ads and AI bloat.
Downside: Sites that rely on, say, WebGL, or DRMâd video, or reading Canvas, may not work right (or at all). Iâve only had trouble so far with Panoramax (which needs WebGL) and uploading to Flickr (which might be a Flatpak thing since it also happens with Waterfox). I do find it annoying that anti-fingerprinting blocks auto-switching between light and dark mode. (Itâs also worth considering your threat model and the fact that small projects still depend on Mozilla for finding and fixing vulnerabilities, and not all the documentation has been updated to refer or link to LibreWolf.)
Otherwise the experience is very much like using Firefox.
Sync and Extensions
LibreWolf can sync settings and bookmarks through Firefox Sync. That seems like a weird choice for a privacy-focused fork, but the data is encrypted before uploading, so Mozilla shouldnât be able to read your sync data even if they wanted to. Though if you use other Firefox-based browsers and sync through the same account, you might end up with a weird mix of settings. I already use Floccus (which lets you bring your own storage) to sync bookmarks with other browsers (including Chromium ones), and it works just fine on here.
LibreWolf is compatible with all Firefox Add-ons, but they recommend just installing a password manager and nothing else. Extensions can increase your attack surface, and sites can look for specific add-ons and use the list of which ones they find to identify you.
Windows has an installer with an optional auto-updater.
For macOS they actually recommend HomeBrew. (Thereâs a disk image too, but it doesnât auto-update.) Even then, you need to add --no-quarantine when installing or upgrading the cask, or else the system will decide the new version is âdamagedâ and refuse to run it. (Itâs a small team, and the app isnât signed with a paid Apple Developer account.) Yes, this does limit the audience that might want to run LibreWolf on macOS to those who are also comfortable with installing and running an extra command-line based package manager.
For Linux they have a few repositories you can add for systems based on Fedora, Debian, Arch etc., plus a Flatpak.
And itâs available for all three platforms on both Intel and ARM.
This is not a review of the web browser. This is an attempt to explain, as succinctly as possible, what the controversy was, why it was a controversy, and why people might still be leery of the situation. Unfortunately, Iâve had to work mostly from memory, because a lot of it happened on the Fediverse where full-text search is also a controversial idea.
The Facts
In June-July 2024, SerenityOS head Andreas Kling stepped down to focus on Ladybird, the OSâs independent web browser. He subsequently announced a non-profit to build it into a cross-plaform alternative not dependent on the Gecko or WebKit/Blink codebases, to a great deal of appreciation from people who want a break from the Google (with a little Mozilla and Apple on the side) hegemony.
A few days later, someone pointed out an issue in SerenityOS where a new contributor offered to update the documentation to include gender-neutral language instead of always assuming the person building the project was a man. Kling rejected it with the statement: âThis project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.â
The Controversy
This stirred up a lot of discussion, much of it heated, both on the Fediverse and on GitHub, as there are a lot of people in programming whose presence in the industry â or presence in general â is considered âpersonal politics.â Transgender individuals especially have often seen this sort of statement used as cover for deliberately excluding them from one sphere or another.
Kling and the Ladybird project doubled down on rejecting active inclusion in the name of being âapolitical.â Others tried to explain that rejecting inclusivity is inherently a political decision.
If youâve watched enough of these things play out, itâs usually the doubling down that causes a lasting split, more than the original disagreement.
The project will not be used as a platform to advertise or promote causes unrelated to browser development or web standards.
To maintain a focused and productive environment, discussions on societal politics and other divisive topics are discouraged in project spaces.
and âbad-faith contributions and brigadingâ
We reserve the right to reject issues and pull requests that appear to be motivated by bad faith.
Additionally, anyone found participating in social media brigading of Ladybird will be permanently banned from the project.
The Fallout
Taken together, and combined with the fact that the pull request that set it all off was simply trying to indicate through language that the project is open to more than just men, the implication is that anyone attempting to include someone whose legal existence or safety is under attack right now by, say, the executive branch of the United States Government, should not bring up anything in the project that might be relevant to their continued existence â like say, privacy features that might be more important to them than for a team largely made up of people who donât face the same risks.
Hereâs the problem: You can say âwe strive to set our differences aside and focus on the shared goal of building the browser.â But those differences can (and likely will) include some people on the team thinking other people on the team shouldnât be alive, or shouldnât be allowed to participate, or their concerns shouldnât be taken as seriously based on who they are. Add the explicit promise to reject âbad faithâ PRs and ban people permanently? It at least looks like exactly what people were worried about in the first place:
Using the language of neutrality to keep people out.
Brave advertises itself as a privacy-focused browser, but for every cool privacy feature I look at thereâs a reminder of how deeply enmeshed it is in the exploitative venture capital side of Silicon Valley, with cryptocurrency features and a core business model that blocks ads on websites and replaces them with its own ads.
So Iâve never really trusted Brave, looking at them with the same kind of skepticism as post-acquisition Opera. But I figured since Iâm evaluating (or re-evaluating) a bunch of other browsers, I should upgrade my skeptical opinion to an informed one.
On first run it showed me an ad for a bitcoin credit card.
So thereâs that.
Moving on. It also wanted me to opt into a âweb discovery projectâ that would share anonymous search activity to help build up their index. To me it seems like the kind of thing that could be de-anonymized with a little context, but at least itâs opt-in.
I remembered reading that theyâd added IPFS support to the browser a while back, which I thought was a good idea. Iâve experimented with it from time to time using an extension with Firefox and Vivaldi, and wanted to try it out in a browser with native support. It turns out Brave just removed IPFS in the second half of 2024. But hey, itâll still detect NFTs!
As for privacy: it comes with an ad blocker and a bunch of anti-fingerprinting measures (comparable to those in LibreWolf). It can use placeholders for embedded posts like Privacy Badger does, but only supports Facebook, X and LinkedIn. Its sync service uses a single client-side key (in the form of a long pass phrase) instead of an account. Thereâs also a Tor mode, which is nice if you donât want to download yet another browser to access onion sites, though itâs still not as private as the official Tor Browser.
The upshot is that while it does seem the browser is a bit tighter, privacy-wise, than LibreWolf where the sites I visit are concernedâŠI donât trust the rest of the application. So now itâs my informed opinion that itâs comparable to post-acquisition Opera. For now Iâm sticking with Vivaldi for Chromium compatibility, LibreWolf for a little more privacy, and when I want to use Tor, Iâll just use Tor.