Hellfire Browser

Hellfire Browser is a very niche project. I was scrolling through F-Droid a
while back, when I realised something was missing. Every browser I saw was
based on one of two engines: Blink or Gecko; and every browser I saw also
happened to be, in the suckless sense of the word, bloated.

At first, I wasn't entirely sure about writing this app. While I knew it would
be a piece of software that I myself would use, I didn't think many other
people (if any at all) would want such a browser as Hellfire.

My inspiration came from a handful of closely-linked places: Links2, Dillo,
suckless.org, and unix_surrealism. However, fans of these projects tend to
favour fully free and open-source software, which Android is not. They also
tend to be anti-corporate. Overall, this would mean that the overlap between
Android users and people who would want to use such a browser is miniscule.

A venn diagram showing a very small overlap between Links2 users and Android users, which is labelled 'Hellfire Browser'.

I had attempted to write web browsers before. My early experiments with
Trident, GeckoDriver, CEFSharp, and WebView had yielded... functional results;
but they had largely been tossed in the Recyle Bin a few weeks after I wrote
them. My latest attempt, Magellan, was my best attempt yet; but sadly that
project is based on WebKit, which is not only far heavier than what I wanted,
but would also probably be difficult to port.

And so I decided that a better way to go would be to figure out how to port
a smaller engine. There were three of these that I considered: Links2,
NetSurf, and Dillo. I eventually settled on the latter and began to research
it... only to discover I had been beaten to the punch.

I looked at the README.md on the Dillo GitHub and followed a link to a
project called Mobilized Dillo, which just so happened to be exactly what I
had been planning to write. This completely changed the direction of the
Hellfire Browser project.

Rather than writing a new browser from the ground up, or building a mobile-
friendly UI around a lightweight engine, I could simply port Mobilized Dillo
over to Android. You see, it runs just fine on mobile, but it was written to
run on Linux. It should be relatively trivial to change a few lines of code so
the software links up with the Android APIs, neaten up the UI, and then pack
the whole thing into an APK.

And that brings us to today, still in the pre-development stage. I don't know
how easy it will be to maintain Hellfire Browser, and I don't know when I'll
have a working alpha available; but it will be ready eventually.

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