Installing the latest NetSurf on Debian Bookworm

In my quest to try out minimalist browsers following Mozilla's controversial announcement of terms of service, I hopped into another old favorite of mine - NetSurf.

At the last time I tried, NetSurf was one of (if not the) most advanced minimalist browsers out there, supporting lots of features that other candidates didn't, like tabbed browsing, advanced CSS and HTML5 support, adblocking and, perhaps blurring a bit the line, rudimentary scripting support. Naturally I was eager to give it a try.

However, similar to the dillo situation, the package for Debian stable was again very out of date. While the official website states the latest release to be 3.11 from December 2023, Bookworm's installable candidate is currently version 3.10 from 2020. That's almost 5 years old as of this writing, about two stable releases ago from today in Debian time. We can do better.

So, do we build the latest from source? That's a little more complicated, as NetSurf's packaging doesn't seem to follow the traditional "configure, make, make install" autotools way, and instead you build each of the libraries manually by tweaking their Makefiles. I couldn't figure it out after a while, so went about to looking for another solution.

Could a backport work? Since the Trixie package is at version 3.11, I thought so. However, even after enabling bookworm-backports, APT would still pull up the 3.10 one, so this wasn't an option. So what was left? Flatpak?

Luckily, it turns out that the NetSurf community maintain a pretty robust CI infrastructure that even keeps building DEB packages in the backstage. And, as expected, it has the latest builds for stable. So you can skip the package manager and install netsurf-gtk_3 and netsurf-common from the latest build with dpkg. You can even preview a 3.12 beta version, built weekly, from there!

So, the commands are:

$ wget https://ci.netsurf-browser.org/debian/bookworm/amd64/netsurf-common_3.11~6803-1_all.deb
$ wget https://ci.netsurf-browser.org/debian/bookworm/amd64/netsurf-gtk_3.11~6803-1_amd64.deb
$ doas dpkg -i netsurf-*.deb
$ netsurf-gtk3

And voila, you are running the latest version! Enjoy this amazing browser!