Xombrero

» see xombrero.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

It began in February 2010 and it was not called Xombrero. It was called xxxterm, written by Marco Peereboom with a group of other OpenBSD users, for OpenBSD specifically. The name was a play on xterm and it was a liability from day one, since it is not a string you can type into a search box at work or say out loud in a conference talk. In 2012 the project renamed itself Xombrero and the problem went away.

The argument behind it was straightforward. Firefox and Chrome had become enormous programs that executed whatever the web handed them, and if you cared about what ran on your machine, you had lost that argument the moment you installed one. Xombrero was about two hundred kilobytes. It was written in C with GTK+ 3 on top of WebKit, released under the ISC license, and shipped with scripting and cookies switched off until you whitelisted a site by hand.

The interface came from vi rather than from any browser. There was a command mode and a set of keybindings meant to keep your hands still. Link hinting let you follow anything on a page without touching the mouse, and configuration was a plain text file. It ran on Unix-likes and, unusually for something this BSD-flavored, on Windows too.

~ the dossier ~

~ the trap ~

WebKit was what made a two-hundred-kilobyte browser possible, and WebKit was what killed it. Xombrero was built against a version of the engine that the wider world moved off, and staying there meant shipping a browser whose rendering layer had a growing pile of published security holes in it. Moving to a current WebKit was not a weekend of work. The API had changed underneath, and the project did not have the people.

That left a browser sold on security running the least secure component in the stack. The last release, version 1.6.4, went out on 17 February 2015. Commits kept trickling in for another year, mostly build fixes from other operating systems, and the final one Peereboom merged was somebody patching the FreeBSD build in May 2016.

~ bye xombrero ~

On 1 February 2017 a ports committer deleted www/xombrero from the OpenBSD ports tree. The Makefile and the distinfo went, and the packaging files went with them, eighty-five lines in total. The commit message is two words long: "Bye Xombrero".

For a program written by OpenBSD developers to run on OpenBSD, being cut from the OpenBSD ports tree is not one packaging decision among many. It is the platform that the thing was made for saying it will no longer carry it. Nothing else needed to happen after that.

~ what is left ~

The repository is still on GitHub and nobody has archived it, but its one-line description has been rewritten into an epitaph: xombrero has been retired and is no longer under development and supported. xombrero.com no longer serves a site. It redirects visitors straight to that repository's wiki, which is a tidier ending than most dead browsers get.

Minimal keyboard-driven browsers did not stop being made. The generation that followed learned the lesson this one paid for and built against engines somebody else keeps patching, which is why they are still here.

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