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 development!

Download

• Download the latest release

Screens

Documentation

Visit the dedicated documentation site for user documentation.

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 is written C++ together with some libraries. It's using the cmark-gfm library for example, which is used for CommonMark (markdown) parsing.

We're using markdown as the source-code of the content/site. No HTML and JavaScript anymore, content is king after all.

LibreWeb Browser is using Gnome GTK3 as UI framework.

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 (build-essential, g++-9)
• CMake (Package: cmake)
• Ninja build system (Package: ninja-build)
• GTK & Pango (including C++ bindings):
  • Package: libgtkmm-3.0-dev under Debian based distros

Developer Docs

See latest Developer Docs.

Research

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

• LibreWeb Research Lab Project