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NetSurf Web Browser

netsurf-browser.org

133 pointsjszymborski54 comments

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One of the few non-webkit/blink/gecko open source browsers.

Dillo, Links, Ladybird, AWeb are the other ones I am aware of.

I think NetSurf is the most popular browser in the small community that still uses Amiga computers.

https://www.netsurf-browser.org/downloads/amiga/

aweb and ibrowse are definitely more popular still.

aweb works on every Amiga and is open-source, but bad support for current www, and quite unmaintained.

ibrowse requires 68020, is reasonably fast but sadly proprietary. Better support for current www, but not great.

netsurf has probably the best support, but is the slowest, needs a lot of RAM and crashes a lot in my experience. It is probably much better with RTG, which I do not have.

Most of the time I'll just use AmiGemini. It is very fast and supports Gopher/Spartan/Finger besides the Gemini I find horribly designed and personally do not care about.

(mainly use my A1200, 68030 @ 50)

Even more with RISCOS which, amazingly, still sees development. I think it was the original platform for NetSurf too.

While there has been some backporting of features TO Gecko from it, Servo is technically an open-source non-webkit/blink/gecko browser engine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847613 Show HN: Resurrecting the Dillo browser (3 days ago)

It's really interesting to run a web browser in a framebuffer without any sort of display manager running [1].

[1]: https://ci.netsurf-browser.org/jenkins/job/docs-netsurf/doxy...

Note that fbdev use deprecated because it's a really bad and broken kernel API.

One can use KMS directly, but at that point you're just implementing all the logic of a display server and might as well just use a small kiosk-style Wayland display server instead.

how is it broken?

The Xorg fbdev driver is deprecated. If you're not Xorg but you want to easily put some pixels on the screen, fbdev is still for you.

The Linux fbdev subsystem is deprecated, but the fb devices will be emulated with DRM because they are useful.

is there an easy way to get a framebuffer with DRM without using fbdev?

It's not super easy. You need to allocate a buffer, modeset the display and commit the buffer.

But if you're doing that, then you've implemented a big portion of a display server. So... Just use one.

"dumb buffers" it's called. man drm-memory

That comment assumes that nothing but Linux exists. I’ve ported netsurf to very very non-Linux environments that just had a framebuffer. So no “just use Wayland” is not the answer. (Ever)

"just had a framebuffer" != Using fbdev. fbdev is a specific outdated API, which drivers only emulate for compatibility with e.g. fbcon (the kernel's terminal emulator).

KMS is how you control the display hardware formally on FreeBSD and Linux. Other platforms will have their own APIs for doing this, but you are writing all the bits of a display server for that platform.

And, well, a small kiosk Wayland server is basically just KMS + libinput + a tiny IPC layer. All you save by doing this yourself is the last bit, but at the cost of having to deal with e.g. display modesetting and GPU buffer management.

arachne did this as well back in the day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachne_(web_browser)

It could run in CGA, really

MicroWeb[0] similarly provides a DOS web browser that works on CGA today.

0. https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb

Not having JavaScript blocks off a huge attack vector, which is great, but how’s the track record of smaller browsers like this on stuff like image rendering attacks? ie, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37478403

I’d love to switch away from the over-complicated internet, but this sort of worry keeps me on Firefox+javascript blocker.

It seems to have a JS engine. It also mentions "improvements to JavaScript handling" for 3.9. I guess it's disabled by default though.

That would be great news. Last time I checked it did not come with JS support.

Indeed, it uses the Duktape engine: https://duktape.org/

One thing you can do is sandbox your browser with AppArmor and/or Firejail to limit the fallout.

Have to wonder how good it is to browse the web without JS - don't many government / utility websites rely on it?

I'm viewing YC HN now from NetSurf. It's cool. I really like it! :)

I don't see adblock being mentioned on the website. I know that it's a convenience feature, and at home my PiHole takes care of it, but everywhere else nowadays adblocking is more important than HTML standard-compliance. (Compliance is pointless, is ads make the content inaccessible)

There’s no point in blocking ads in no ad scripts can run in the first place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38234705 about netsurf's GNUstep variant named websurf.

There is actually another project called NeoSurf (https://github.com/CobaltBSD/neosurf/) which is a fork of NetSurf with the stated goals of "various privacy-focused improvements and additions, and a revamped build system." as well as other improvements.

My first exposure to this is that it is the only browser pre-installed onto the super useful gparted live rescue ISO that I've used many times.

It's good enough for basic troubleshooting and e.g. visiting the archwiki, but it's always a bit of a learning curve to use again.

Are there any good non-boated web browsers that are open sourced for macOS? With binaries available?

Probably nothing you haven't heard of unless you'd be happy compiling and using an incomplete "project" browser, like Ladybird. The list with pre-built binaries includes: Mozilla Firefox (or Waterfox), Google Chromium (or Brave), and Apple WebKit via Safari (so, open source engine, closed-source chrome) or other browsers that use WebKit (e.g. DuckDuckGo's Orion).

Did you mean Kagi's Orion?

Thank you! Yes, I was confused — DDG's browser is "DuckDuckGo for Mac", and also uses WebKit.

PaleMoon (http://www.palemoon.org/) is a pretty decent and actively maintained browser with binaries available for multiple platform including macOS. It looks pretty nice with a MacOS theme (https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/xmoon/) too.

Safari's rendering engine is open source, but the UI isn't.

https://www.webkit.org

thanks for mention it. For people who don't like using js heavy site, this is a very good way to just browse lite document base (not SPA) web site. No Brave or Ad blocker needed. And it is one of few browser will display google in html old format.

I want to like NetSurf but the UI and keybindings are so different from every other browser.

> Why Choose NetSurf

It's not malware, we promise.

That's not FUD, I swear.

NetSurf started in 2002 and has been packaged by Debian since 2007.[1] After having looked at it, is there something in particular that makes you believe it is malware?

[1] https://snapshot.debian.org/package/netsurf/

FireFox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Chrome: https://www.google.com/chrome/dr/download/?brand=JSBI&ds_kid...

Safari: https://www.apple.com/safari/

And now we come to...

NetSurf: https://www.netsurf-browser.org/

It's a joke about perception.

Needless to say, I did not get your joke. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are not very good at running on the kind of hardware that NetSurf is made for.

I tried it just now and it renders very poorly some common sites like facebook (bad rendering) or twitter (not supported at all)

docs links are mostly broken 404

https://www.netsurf-browser.org/documentation/progress#Gener...

It doesn't support JS, head to https://m.facebook.com maybe. On Twitter, they used to have a JSless page, but now it's defunct.

It does have optional support for JS thru Duktape[1] Engine, if I recall correctly, but that engine doesn't support a lot of modern JS stuff, mostly being limited to ECMAScript 5.

[1]: https://duktape.org/

It's a cool historic artifact, but I'd argue a browser without JS support these days is like a text editor without syntax highlighting.

If the web needs JS to work even to display non-dynamic content, then the web it's utterly broken.

A good number of sites are utterly broken.

I remember being able to browse normal sites with JavaScript disabled as late as 2010, but since then I’ve had to downgrade to Firefox+noscript.

DilloNG with the PSP user agent and with the remote CSS disabled works surprisingly fine for lots of sites.

For everything else, mpv+yt-dlp for media and gopher://magical.fish under lynx/sacc for news/services.

I can't see the downsides to a lack of JS or syntax highlighting.

Most of the websites I interact with are either very interactive web apps which have no hope of working without JavaScript or are basically made up of text documents I want to read. It is shocking how much the document-style websites improve if you browse them without JavaScript. People have really put a lot of crap on top of what is basically just a text file.

Refreshingly lightweight?

or, it's like a document reader with a far lower amount and chance of security issues.

https://mbasic.facebook.com

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