User:Pilamipolima/Xombrero

xombrero (formerly known as xxxterm) is an open-source web browser developed with a goal to be a lightweight yet secure replacement for full featured browsers like Firefox. It was initially developed by several OpenBSD users specifically for that operating system, but later was ported to other BSD-OS, Linux and Windows.

The browser has found a niche among minimalist browsers for heavy keyboard users by balancing minimalism with usability.

xxxterm was renamed to xombrero in May 2012.

Features
A notable feature of xombrero is the ability to control the cookies, plug-ins and JavaScript policies on per-website basis. The user can define the whitelists of trusted websites for each of those security risks.

xombrero was designed for experienced command-line interface users, so it includes the features typically requested by such an audience: mouseless browsing, no URL prefetch, vi-like user interface and navigation (including command mode), plain text file configuration, and link hinting.

An advertisement blocking feature is intentionally absent from xombrero. The authors recommend using the ad-filtering proxy AdSuck for such purpose.

User interface
xombrero provides a command mode (designed after vi) for entering commands. The user can perform the common tasks like switching between tabs (buffers in xombrero's terminology), entering URLs, following links and navigating through browser history and bookmarks with keyboard. Key bindings are also provided for use in default mode. Since version 1.9.0 the EMACS-like hybrid mode is also available.

Unless disabled in configuration file, xombrero window with two panels, providing the ordinary layout of a web browser window: one containing URL entry, backward, forward, stop and go buttons and optional search string entry ("fancy bar") and another reporting current URL, zoom level indicator and position in page indicator ("status bar"). Using these panels and a mouse the user may operate xombrero like Firefox or Midori.

Release numbering
As web browsers are generally fast evolving, xxxterm developers didn't actually create releases. Instead they were making source code snapshots identified by CVS tags. When xxxterm development moved to Git, the version numbers for releases were rethought: since then their format is "X.Y.Z". xombrero's version numbers start with 1.0.0.