![A friendly beaver](media/beaver.png)

# What / why / how

The Web is our only hope for a platform that provides permissionless user agency. This project is about scratching that itch, building a Web based user agent that can play new tricks.

Our mascot is a beaver because they are fantastic animals that heal their environment; read https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/ for a good introduction, and come with us rewild your web!

We build on [Servo](https://servo.org) because despite a new wave of browsers being built, they mostly go with forking blink, and that's not how we will diversify the Web. Also this is a very fun project to contribute to!

The end goal is to have a suite of Web user agents. Running on top of an existing OS is a temporary stop-gap, because being a second class citizen on someone else's platform is a dead end. We will create new personal computing environments for mobile, desktop, media players, etc. We have a long road ahead, but we're not in a hurry.

We hang out on [Servo's zulip](https://servo.zulipchat.com) if you want to chat about the project.

# Building

## Prerequisites

- Install the `forkme` utility from https://tangled.org/me.webbeef.org/forkme
- Run `forkme init`
- From the `source` directory, run `./mach bootstrap --skip-lints` to setup Servo build dependencies.

## Desktop builds

- Update with `forkme apply`
- Build with `cargo build -r -p beaver-shell`
- Run with `cargo run -r -p beaver-shell` or directly from the `target` directory as usual for Rust projects.

The current UI allows multiple windows, and each one is a simple tiling window manager. There is also a floating search window.

![Overview of 3 pages in tiling arrangement](media/desktop_1.png)

![Main menu and 2 pages in vertical stacking](media/desktop_2.png)

![Scrolling in the tiling WM, and the context menu](media/desktop_3.png)

![The settings app, with a few themes](media/desktop_4.png)

![The floating search window](media/desktop_5.png)

## Mobile builds (cross-compilation from macOS/Linux)

The target platform is aarch64 Linux devices such as the Pixel 3a running Mobian (see https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Google/Pixel3a).

![A rewilding Pixel 3a](media/pixel_3a.jpeg)

### Prerequisites

- Docker Desktop (with at least 24GB memory allocated in Settings > Resources)

### Building

Cross-compilation uses a Docker container with an ARM64 toolchain and all native dependencies. The source tree is bind-mounted so no separate clone is needed.

```bash
# First build creates the Docker image, then compiles (takes a while):
./build-arm64.sh release

# Subsequent builds are incremental:
./build-arm64.sh release

# Production build with LTO:
./build-arm64.sh production
```

The binary is output to `dist/beavershell`.

You can adjust parallelism if needed: `CARGO_BUILD_JOBS=2 ./build-arm64.sh release`

### Deploying to device

The deploy script rsyncs the binary, resources, and UI to a remote device over SSH:

```bash
./deploy-arm64.sh
```

This expects key-based SSH access to `mobian@mobian`. Then run on device:

```bash
SURFMAN_FORCE_GLES=1 WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-0 ./beaver/beavershell
```

Here's what this looks like

![Simple homescreen](media/mobile_1.png)

![Searching](media/mobile_2.png)

![The radial context menu](media/mobile_3.png)

![Editing the current page URL](media/mobile_4.png)