Dissenter
Dissenter is a "Free Speech" web browser made by Gab Ai. It appears to be a fork of an old Brave version which itself was forked off an old Chromium version. It is available for Windows, macOS and there are .deb and .rpm versions for Linux. The Linux version is not very useful since it doesn't even run or produce a web browser window.
Features and Usability
Dissenter, on Debian 10 Buster, starts and produces the less informative message [11051:11051:0707/093312.546754:FATAL:zygote_host_impl_linux.cc(116)] No usable sandbox! You probably need to enable user namespaces in your kernel. See https://brave-browser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installing-brave.html#linux for more information.
Trace/breakpoint trap
That's it, that's all the Dissenter package does. Or did, as of the latest version available in July 2019. That is when we tested the latest Debian package, which was also the only Linux package available at the time.
We wanted to re-test it to see if later version actually work on Linux or not in May 2021. We couldn't since the website, behind Cloudflare, returned Error 502 when we tried to get a new version for review.
Verdict and conclusion
Dissenter is a really bad web browser compared to even the simplest of web browsers such as lynx since lynx will actually display web pages.
Under the hood
A sneak-peak at /usr/bin/dissenter-browser reveals that it is an older bash start-up script for Chromium. The actual browser executable installs to /opt/gab/dissenter
A brief look at the files the .deb package installs reveals a disturbing /etc/cron.daily/dissenter-browser job infecting the system. Oddly, it will try to remove dissenter from apt's sources list and exit 0 and that's it. It's an odd file.
/opt/gab/dissenter/resources has two folders called brave_extensions and brave_rewards which clearly indicate that Dissenter is indeed based on the Brave browser.
iToddler Versions
Some iToddler edited this page in January 2021 with the following additions:
"Dissenter installs and works on Mac OS without noticeable issues. The browser offers most of the same functions and extensions like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari."
The iToddler also changed our "Verdict and conclusion" to:
"Dissenter is a very capable web browser that offers diversity to Internet users."
This could indicate that Dissenter works fine on iToddler machines and operating systems. We don't have any iToys so we can't verify one way or the other.
This is linuxreviews, not itoddlerreviews, so it doesn't change our point of view. That would only change if it becomes possible to download and install and test a actually working version, in which case we'd review it as a working product.
Links
dissenter.com on May 9th, 2021
Dissenters homepage is at dissenter.com. You can try to go there regularly on the off-chance that it'll work and let you download a "web browser" that does noting but show FATAL:zygote_host_impl_linux.cc messages in your terminal.
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