LibreWeb Browser

Decentralized Web-Browser; a revolution of the WWW.

What would you do different; if you could reinvent The Internet in 21st century? With all the knowledge and new technologies available today.

I was inspired by Douglas Engelbart, Tim Berners-Lee and Ted Nelson as well as projects like IPFS, Jekyll, ARPANET, and more.

Note: Project is still in Alpha phase!

Download

• Download the latest release

Screens

Ideas/Features

The current success criteria:

• Everyone should be able to easily read and create a site/blog/news page and publish the content online (without minimal technical knowledge);
• Built-in easy-to-use editor (whenever you want to publish some content without programming language knowledge);
• Decentralized (no single-point of failure or censorship), like: P2P, DHT and IPFS;
• No client-server approach (the client is also the server and visa versa) - think mesh network.
• Encrypted transfers;
• Data is stored redundantly within the network (no single-point of failure);
• Versioning/revisions of content and documenents (automatically solves broken 'links', that can't happy anymore);
• Publisher user should be able to add additional information about the document/page, eg. title or path (similar in how Jekyll is using the YML format for meta data)
• Human-readable source-code (eg. Markdown, could be extended as well);
• End-user is in control about the layout and styling (just like with e-books);
• Content is King;
• Fast and Extensible!

Note: Since HyperText (so is HTML) is not used, you can even ditch the HTTP protocol. However TLS, for encryption, can still be used.

Developers

Decentralized Browser written in C++20 with C libraries. And using the cmark-gfm library, used for CommonMark (markdown) parsing.

Browser is using GTK 3 as UI library including Pango & Cairo for text drawing and manipulation.

For now we will use markdown as the source of the site. No HTML and JavaScript anymore, content is king after all.

Development Environment

I'm using VSCodium editor, with the following extensions installed: C/C++, CMake, CMake Tools, PlantUML, Markdown All in One, vscode-icons and GitLab Workflow.

Build Dependencies

For the build you need at least:

• GCC 9 or higher (GCC 8 should also work, but not adviced. Package: build-essential)
• CMake (Package: cmake)
• Ninja build system (Package: ninja-build)
• GTK & Cairo & Pango (including C++ bindings):
  • Package: libgtkmm-3.0-dev under Debian based distros

Documentation

See latest Developer Docs.

Research

For research document plus findings including explanation (like diagrams) see the:

• LibreWeb Research Lab Project