FixBrowser

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FixBrowser/FixProxy 0.3 - browse the web with privacy (2025/05/11)

FixBrowser is a lightweight web browser created from scratch. It intentionally doesn't support JavaScript to make things faster and much less resource intensive. Instead it contains an updated set of scripts that fix and improve various websites.

This release covers mostly changes to FixProxy which allows to use the "backend" part of the browser in a regular browser which is used for layout/rendering. It is usable for normal browsing unlike FixBrowser which is still in alpha stage.

This provides the ability to browse the web without JavaScript with the fix scripts applied. It also uses a whitelist approach so you can be sure that no 3rd party tracking can happen.

I've been using FixProxy for multiple years as my main way of web browsing with good results. It allows to also easily mix direct usage of the websites with access through FixProxy per each individual tab.

More information and download links are on the homepage.

Change log

• Added support for missing single byte encodings
• Added sending of referer header pointing to the requested domain
• Added support for <picture> tag in FixProxy
• Added support for CSS variables in FixProxy
• Added ability to set default URL as command-line parameter
• Added parsing of cursor CSS property
• Increased maximum allowed HTTP response header size
• Fixed error on duplicate headers in HTTP response
• [archive] Fixed and improved loading of timeline in Wayback Machine
• [anubis] Added support for Anubis gatekeeper
• [google] Added support for Google Search
• [reddit] Added loading of all comments
• [reddit] Fixed loading of user profiles that require age confirmation
• [reddit] Changed to track continued discussions separately
• [giphy] Fixed loading of images
• [various] Added support for geforcenowspecs.cloud

Increased support of websites

This release adds support for some single byte encodings that are still in active usage, most notably the KOI8-R charset used by some Russian websites.

Some overprotective webs require the referer header. So it nows defaults to sending it with a link to the same domain.

A support for CSS variables was added. Various websites use this feature to style the pages. Without the support the text was hard or impossible to read or even the whole page needed to be viewed with CSS styles disabled.

Internal improvements

The work on the browser has started on a "older" version of the langauge before the classes implementation was fully developed. So there was a lot of code still written in the old style of the base FixScript language. A large part of the code was upgraded to the new version.

The language is versatile enough to allow different source code files to be in different "versions" of the language at once, seamlessly working together. This way I can update it part by part in the right moment instead of being forced to do all the work at once.

In FixScript you can introduce basically any feature at any time by simply writing the corresponding code for it (see token processing). So it was easy to add support for string switches and time literals.

The string switches use hashing to make it efficent. The time literals are just a simple but very useful addition where I can write stuff like 1 hour instead of 3600. This makes the intent much more clear and less error-prone.

Anubis gatekeeper

In the last few years there is a huge rise of bots from the various AI companies that are extremely aggressive towards the websites they try to scrape/use. They don't identify themselves, don't use any rate limits, ignore robots.txt, don't cache (so the same request is done many times), etc.

For the websites this is problematic in the increased costs to host and is effectivelly a DDoS attack for specialized websites such as Git repositories where specific queries can be costly to retrieve.

Some protect themselves using various services that insert browser checks and/or captchas. These are problematic because they require a full browser to pass, making access harder for normal usage (or even impossible for various valid scripting) while the bots can easily workaround it by using a full browser for the scraping.

Lately a tool called Anubis (GitHub) started to gain traction as the solution to this problem in a better way. Instead of such browser checks it uses PoW challenge instead. This provides an automatic way to allow access for normal usage while making it costly for the bots.

In order to work it requires JavaScript, therefore support was added for Anubis so you can visit the protected websites without JS.

Archive.org

The support for Wayback Machine was fixed and there is now an improved timeline so you can easily switch to different versions of the archived web pages.

Google Search

Google stopped supporting it's search engine for browsers that don't support/enable JavaScript. However it still provides such support for Lynx browser, so support for pretending to be that browser for Google Search was added.

Reddit improvements

Reddit support was improved: now all comments are loaded for each post instead of a maximum of 500. The deeply nested "continued discussions" are tracked separately so you don't miss any new comments. Many user profiles are marked to be viewed by people who are 18 or older. This has been fixed and the profiles can be directly viewed.

Giphy

Giphy is a popular hosting for short animated images. A minor fix was applied so that images are loading properly and the invisible overlay that prevented interaction with the image was removed.

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