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Comment by tuananh | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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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