dafyddcrosby / sw3m

ABANDONED - development has ceased. Code remains available for reuse. sw3m was a w3m fork tuned for OpenBSD

sw3m

Looking for a web browser that's secure, speedy, small, standards-driven, and just plain super-duper?

Rationale

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from."

sw3m is a text-based browser that:

• Has a permissive license (ie MIT)
• Aims for a 'clean' codebase, with portability handled separately
• Will handle modern web standards to the extent a text-based browser can
• Focuses on hardening and security - recognizes that, yes, the web is hostile, even to a text-based browser

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Why was support removed for DOS + Windows?

A. Microsoft killed POSIX support in Windows XP, and Interix with Windows 8. Yes, there's Cygwin and MinGW, but there's little benefit to supporting those versus the upkeep. Generally speaking, sw3m is intended for systems where POSIX isn't an afterthought/sales gimmick.

Q. Why was support removed for OS/2?

A. It's dead, Jim.

Q. explicit_bzero isn't POSIX, what gives?

A. memset can get optimized out of the code, which is not something you want when you're trying to clear the memory. explicit_bzero is easily implemented, and is currently built-in when not found by autotools.

Q. Will sw3m work on <blah>

A. The reference platform is the latest OpenBSD stable release. Long term, there are plans to create a sw3m-portable (as is done for OpenSSH and LibreSSL). However, portability work is unlikely to start until the OpenBSD releases are in good shape.

Q. Why is <feature> not enabled by default?!

A. While sw3m aims to support a great deal of functionality 'out of the box' (eg not requiring recompilation to enable), where possible certain functionality will not enabled by default - you must turn it on in the configuration. This removes attack surface if you only want to use sw3m for dumping parsed HTML, etc.