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Comment by eis | Hacker News Reader

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eis·

It's a bit hidden on the page in the documentation so I'll write it here to save people time:

NetSurf doesn't support Javascript properly.

For some that might be OK but for most it'll be a showstopper.

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It doesn't even support CSS2 properly (e.g. paragraph justification, em, etc). And despite claims of being blazing fast, as an user my experience is that it is very slow for more complicated pages, whereas for websites that are almost just plain text and images it beats any WebKit/Gecko browser out there.

It's great for Googling when debugging your code or reading HN when compiling, other than that I'd stick with <your favorite browser>.

> And despite claims of being blazing fast, as an user my experience is that it is very slow for more complicated pages, whereas for websites that are almost just plain text and images it beats any WebKit/Gecko browser out there.

I downloaded it and tried it. Every page loads very slowly, even incredibly simple sites. Maybe it has a slow HTTP implementation?

Is it "NetSurf doesn't support javascript and likely won't" or "Netsurf doesn't support javascript yet"?

They're in the process of rewriting the DOM handler to support dynamic changes from JavaScript. JavaScript itself runs well.

Yet. The Git version seems to already have preliminary JavaScript integration, based on Duktape. There was also an earlier attempt in 2012-13, utilizing SpiderMonkey.

Ok, so that explains why many sites did not work. Almost nice, though, not to experience all that annoying/excessive javascript that is so prevalent these days. I just love that NetSurf homepage - nothing that moves, pops up, scrolls oddly etc.

Also it doesn't support HTML5.

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