Best Linux Apps for Advanced Users and Hackers

hv3 has been unmaintained for years sadly. It's a C-based HTML/CSS parser hooked up/exposed to a Tcl/Tk-based UI (the renderer itself is a Tcl module). IIRC it has some kind of very rudimentary "ECMAScript" support, I'm not sure which engine it uses. If hv3 has one major issue, it's that the entire loading/processing architecture is heavily single-threaded, and UI-blocking; the whole thing locks up until the page is done loading and rendering. Unfortunately, due to its ancient/naive/unoptimized architecture (built for KB-sized webpages with zero complexity) I found it embarassingly easy to bog down when I tried it years ago (...and webpages were smaller).

NetSurf originated on the Amiga, found its way into RISC OS, and compiles for an eyebrow-raising number of platforms. It's ridiculously ambitious and aims to support HTML5, but has a nanoscopic development team. It's also written in C. Last I heard, JS was being slowly added in, and I vaguely recall a renderer overhaul to support dynamic rendering so things like underlining on :hover would actually work as you moused over/away.

One thing though. I'm not sure if it was the old machine I was trying it on or just an unoptimized rendering pipeline, but Dillo feels "realtime" in terms of scrolling on virtually a toaster, while NetSurf seems to have an almost-perceptible <50ms delay when moving around. A close runner-up is that NetSurf's load times are... lengthy, as well. NetSurf doesn't lock the UI (or get into infinite loops :D) like hv3 does, but it tends to like downloading entire sites before displaying anything, which can be honestly distracting. (Dillo is of course faster here purely because it discards 99% of layout and style :D)

That said, out of the two, NetSurf definitely warrants the most effort (although, conveniently, prebuilt Linux binaries can be found for hv3).

One protip for NetSurf: follow the build instructions to the letter - download and shell-source the build script, and use the recommended paths, at least the first time. If you do that, it builds in about 5 minutes (git clone takes longer than make does!) with no hassle (eg, the build tools continually failing to find everything). The build environment is extremely simple, but the fastest way to understand it (if you want to point the build dir somewhere else for example) is to run through how it wants to work at least once.