Basilisk 2023.11.05 Build 20231105131031 Stable | Portable

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6 November 2023, 09:51

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Basilisk is a modern, full-featured web browser. It aims to retain useful technologies that its sibling Mozilla Firefox has removed. A XUL-based web-browser demonstrating the Unified XUL Platform (UXP). This browser is a close twin to pre-Servo Firefox in how it operates.

Basilisk is a free and Open Source XUL-based web browser, featuring the well-known Firefox-style interface and operation. It is based on the Goanna layout and rendering engine (a fork of Gecko) and builds on the Unified XUL Platform (UXP), which in turn is a fork of the Mozilla code base without Servo or Rust. Basilisk as an application is primarily a vessel for development of the XUL platform it builds upon, and additionally a potential replacement for Firefox to retain the use of Firefox Extensions. Basilisk is development software. This means that it should be considered more or less «beta» at all times; it may have some bugs and is provided as-is, with potential defects. Like any other Free Software community project, it comes without any warranty or promise of fitness for any particular purpose. That being said: of course we will do our best to provide an as stable and secure browser as possible with every official release of Basilisk. It should be noted that because of this focus on platform development, the browser itself (the application code) will be released and maintained mostly as-it-is, with very little change or development on the user interface or browser front-end features.

Features

Main features:

Full support for JavaScript's ECMAscript 6 standard for modern web browsing.
Support for all NPAPI plugins (Unity, Silverlight, Flash, Java, authentication plugins, etc.).
Support for XUL/Overlay Mozilla-style extensions.
Experimental support for WebExtensions (in gecko-target mode). Please note that some Mozilla-specific WebExtension APIs are not yet available.
Support for ALSA on Linux.
Support for WebAssembly (WASM).
Support for advanced Graphite font shaping features.
Support for modern web cryptography: up to TLS 1.3, modern ciphers, HSTS, etc.

Important differences with Mozilla Firefox:

Uses Goanna as a layout and rendering engine. Goanna behaves slightly differently than Gecko in certain respects and may result in different display of web pages. e.g.: Goanna renders gradients in a more accurate color space (non-premultiplied).
Builds on UXP, our XUL platform in development. As such XUL is alive and well in this browser and will not be deprecated.
Has some long-standing known issues with the Mozilla code-base fixed (e.g. CVE-2009-1232).
Does not use Rust or the Photon user interface. You can expect a familiar interface as-carried by Firefox between v29 and v56.
Does not use Electrolysis (e10s, multi-process browsing).
Does not require walled-garden extension signing.