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Comment by gregsadetsky | Hacker News Reader

I’m currently trying to port a browser (any browser) to an extremely light device - 16 Mb of RAM, ~200 Mhz. No standard/system library.

I’m curious to see how Browsh fares!

My first try at compiling NetSurf was met with failure (I was stumped by the build process)

Do people here have recommendations for super minimal browsers whose source source is specifically very portable / easy to adapt / easy to configure? Something where ripping out even the network internals (i.e. libcurl) and replacing it is easy-ish?

Thanks!

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It will not run in 16Mb. It's a headless Firefox with an extension to render the DOM to text.

From the docs:

"When the CLI starts, it looks for a compatible browser (currently only Firefox) and starts it in headless mode...."

[1] https://www.brow.sh/docs/introduction/

For sure, I'm imagining running the headless Firefox on a different machine and porting the light CLI/tty browser to the small device.

That's actually the point of browsh -- you can ssh from anywhere to a (different) machine running the headless Firefox. The machine ssh'ing in doesn't need much except a terminal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachne_(web_browser) is a possibility. Old graphical DOS browser (so, minimal library dependencies) which can run even on an 8086. Runs on Linux too, so there's an aspect of portability. Probably well behind modern web standards though, despite its recent update.

Well the whole point of Browsh is that you run it on a remote server and use other clients to access it. You can even access Browsh with plain curl using Browsh's HTTP server mode: https://www.brow.sh/docs/in-browser-usage

Thanks a lot -- running browsh locally just now was a real eye-opener. I had tried it before but forgot how amazing it is.

The monochrome mode is exactly what I'm looking for, and the documentation is extremely clear. I will definitely spend some time taking a stab at a port. Really really excited about it.

Will probably contact you with updates if I'm able to make some progress :-)

Thank you for this great work!

Wow, that's really motivating to hear, thank so much :)

Are you fine with text-only, or want graphics? Try Dillo.

16MB of RAM and 200MHz (x86) would be more than sufficient to run Windows 95 and Internet Explorer 3, which is a full GUI browser, so that's probably the level of functionality you'll end up achieving.

Thanks, it was pretty motivating to see Dillo compile pretty much out of the box! Kudos to Dillo for portability (the source code is from 2015 and I'm testing it on a relatively recent macOS...!)

The legwork to port it (its underlying FLTK toolkit, the socket-communicating daemons, openssl, etc.) looks a bit daunting however. I might consider it if nothing else works.

Thank you

Better if you get the mercurial version:

hg clone https://hg.dillo.org

Also there's fork on github with mpv+youtube-dl support.

Dillo is one thing I remember using.

There was a DOS one (arachne?) I couldn't try, And Links2 also has GUI but it's quite archaic.

I think you'd have better luck trying to compile NetSurf.

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