Badwolf Mini Web Browser

November

2025

linux

25 November 2025 16:29

The Badwolf web browser is based on the WebKitGTK engine.

If you need a simple web browser to view sites rich in graphics and scripts JavaScript, but with economical use of the processor and RAM, you can pay attention to browsers based on WebKitGTK. This engine is used the following web browsers:

Epiphany - GNOME; Heavy and buggy browser - white window when opening the site. Installation and launch:
flatpak --user install https://nightly.gnome.org/repo/appstream/org.gnome.Epiphany.Canary.flatpakref && flatpak run org.gnome.Epiphany.Canary
Midori - A lightweight and fast browser with basic features and cookie support; the package is available for Debian and Ubuntu. flatpak install flathub org.midori_browser.Midori или snap install midori
Rose Browser - a little-known browser written in lua, is in the sources, but it was not possible to compile it. There is a fork of it:
Rosenrot-browser in C and JavaScript languages.
Baggins -web browser in Python using WebKitGTK.
lariza -web browser written on pure C with GTK+3, GLib, Webkit2GTK+.
Bad Wolf is a web browser discussed in this article.

Unlike the Epiphany browser, which is also based on WebKitGTK, Badwolf worked immediately and properly.
Unlike Midori, the Badwolf browser uses fewer resources because it doesn't use the bulky Gnome platform (611 MB of size).

Features of the Badwolf web browser:

Web page display engine WebKitGTK/WebKitGTK+
RAM consumption is 130 MB.
Implemented full support for HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Focused on speed and privacy
Ability to disable images and JS with two clicks of the mouse button

Found in operating system repositories

Alpine
AUR (Arch Linux)
Fedora
FreeBSD
Gentoo
OpenBSD
OpenMandriva
Slack
Void

Architectures:
x86_64/amd64, x86(32), armv7hf, armv8+/aarch64

Window systems:
X11, Waylan.d.

Web page with description:https://hacktivis.me/projects/badwolf

The browser is developed by a team of 11 people. GIT developers
git clone https://anongit.hacktivis.me/git/badwolf.git/
Compilation using ninja is not considered by me here in this article.

Installation method suitable for Debain/Ubuntu - build from source - described on the website blog.ilja.space.

1) Installing dependencies, utilities for building and working with GIT

sudo apt install -y gcc libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libxml2 libsoup2.4-dev libatspi2.0-dev make pkg-config gettext git

2) Cloning a git repository

git clone https://gitlab.com/lanodan/badWolf

3) Install the working branch onrelease-1.0

cd badWolf
git checkout release-1.0

4) Build from source and install

make
sudo make install

You can run badwolf from the same folder:

~/badWolf/badwolf

Desktop shortcut to BadWolf was installed in the directory /usr/local/share/applications/.

Checking for a shortcut

ls -l /usr/local/share/applications/badwolf.desktop

If desktop label file badwolf.desktop is not installed (for example, for absence of rights), its original exists in the folder ~/badWolf,
and you can copy it manually:

cp ~/badWolf/badwolf.desktop /usr/local/share/applications/badwolf.desktop

In antiX, after copying the shortcut, you need to run the command so that the shortcut appears in the main Start menu:

sudo desktop-menu --write-out-global

In other operating systems, you need to end the session (log out) and start a new one (log in).

Launch from the "Start" menu - "Internet" - "BadWolf" (by example Linux Green):
badwolf

The Badwolf window has the simplest, most minimal appearance, but the RAM consumption is only 137 MB.
badwolf1
Only the IMG button is pressed - image loading is enabled and "JS" is JavaScript is disabled.

To start browsing websites, you need to enter the full site address with https:// in the address bar.
For example:https://2ip.ru/browser-update/
The web page opened almost instantly:
badwolf2
The User-Agent string is interestingly defined, as the Safari browser:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/60.5 Safari/605.1.15

The BadWolf browser has no browsing history. The number of lines in the application has been reduced to 1500 and the code base has been thoroughly tested.

Purpose

BadWolf web browser is well suited for minimalistic operating systems such as antiX, or for a bootable flash drives.

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