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NetSurf: Small, fast, free web browser
- draven 11y agoIt looks like today is Alternative Browser Day on HN. So for those who don't know it, there's also Xombrero: https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero It's based on Webkit so it's more compatible with the "modern web" than dillo/netsurf.
- jakeogh 11y agosurf (best with tabbed) is another webkit option: http://surf.suckless.org/ http://surf.suckless.org/
- wtbob 11y agoI really like surf and its model, but it needs ad blocking. I was working on that a few months back, but got distracted by other projects. Incidentally, the AdBlock list format is…insane.
- XzetaU8 11y ago"dwb" is also webkit based but more minimal (Support for Adblocking, among other things) http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/ http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/
- knlje 11y agoThank you for the suggestion! I have so far loved the minimalistic feeling and intuitive keybindings for a vi-user.
- grp 11y agoand as an alternative: qutebrowser! same concept as dwb but with Qt and not gtk for those who cares. https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser
- mitchtbaum 11y agoAlso, Luakit: http://luakit.org/ http://luakit.org/ It has lots of extensions, like Adblock and Noscript, written in highly-readable Lua, also making it very hacker friendly and very fast.
- scrollaway 11y agoLast time I recommended Luakit, I was told it was no longer developed and superceded by dwb (linked below by someone else)
- gh02t 11y agodwb is dead too, fortunately there is a replacement for that too: https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser . It's already pretty much a drop-in replacement. The dev is very responsive and friendly as well.
- XzetaU8 11y agoSure it's not that active but I wouldn't call it dead. last commit: 2015-07-26 https://bitbucket.org/portix/dwb/commits/ https://bitbucket.org/portix/dwb/commits/
- gh02t 11y agoI thought I remember seeing a thread on Reddit that it'd been abandoned around that time and wasn't just inactive, but I could be mistaken.
- XzetaU8 11y agoIt's right there on your qutebrowser link, dwb is first on the "Similar Projects" list (Scroll down) their "Unmaintained" comment leads to the reddit thread you mention, mind you that thread is 1 year old and the user/post is deleted: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2huqbc/dwb_abandoned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2huqbc/dwb_abandoned...
- arm 11y agoAnother WebKit-based option (for OS X) is OmniWeb (it’s still alive!): http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/ http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/
- soapdog 11y agoReally??? Oh my, I thought that was dead... remember using it long long long ago
- Johnny_Brahms 11y agoI am a growing fan of QupZilla. The only thing I miss is functionality similar to Self-destructing cookies. http://www.qupzilla.com/ http://www.qupzilla.com/
- chippy 11y agoI use Midori - another webkit based browser. http://midori-browser.org/ http://midori-browser.org/
- mtgx 11y agoI think the only way new browsers are going to succeed in the future is if they adopt some major new technology that the mainstream browsers either will never use, or will wait many years until they consider it. Perhaps something like IPFS or some blockchain technology, or anything like that, that is proven to work well but the mainstream browsers still think it's too new and risky, or perhaps just don't want to piss of the MPAA, which by the way, is now a member of the W3C. The new browsers will need to allow for significant new possibilities, for users to want to adopt them.
- digi_owl 11y agoFrankly i have taken to consider all webkit browsers the same, meaning that the web is heading towards another monoculture akin to what we had when IE was what everyone developed for.
- lambda 11y agoI don't really think we're in that much danger. For one, WebKit is now forked, into WebKit and Blink. Both of them are rapidly diverging. And there are still enough people using Gecko and Trident (and now EdgeHTML) that you can't just target the intersection of WebKit and Blink and still have any reasonable kind of coverage. For another, I think you fail to understand just how dominant and stagnant the browser market had become when IE was dominant. Not only one browser, but one version of one browser, had over 90% market share, and in controlled environments like corporate networks, effectively 100%. In that kind of environment, it was completely reasonable to just target that one browser. Today, even if you add up all of the WebKit and Blink browsers based on the most generous market share counts, you won't break 70% market share, and there are even still some statistics that have IE/Trident at over 50% market share. So unless you're targeting a very specific market, like iPhone users (where yes, WebKit's share is 100% due to Apple's monopoly), it's very hard to find any demographic in which there is such a strong dominance as IE had back in the day. Additionally, browsers and engines are actually being released at regular intervals these days, with new features and bugfixes. Firefox/Gecko and Chrome/Blink are on rolling 6 week release cycles, meaning that there's very little lag to getting new features and fixes out. Safari/WebKit is released less often, but once every year or two. There were 5 years between the release of IE 6 and IE 7, and IE 7 didn't even pass Acid2, it would be another couple of years until IE 8 did. That extremely long period of time in which one version of one engine was so dominant led to an awful lot of sites designing themselves exactly around the bugs and quirks of that one engine. Couple that with the fact that standards committees are actually working on features that people want, and are making real progress. XHTML stagnated the standards process for a long time, working on a backwards-incompatible specification that did a lot of architecture astronautics on representing documents, when what people needed were backwards-compatible enhancements that supported web applications so they could roll things out incrementally as support became good enough. CSS got a bit mired in CSS 2, but CSS 2.1 allowed them to slim down the specification and get out something working, while CSS 3 allowed them to work on individual features separately, and thus be able to make progress without having to wait for everything in the world to be ready. Another big reason for IE's dominance was that it had proprietary features, like filters and ActiveX and webfont support, and there were no standards that covered similar ground. Now we have HTML5, a plethora of new APIs for interacting with the browser, a substantial number of CSS enhancements, highly competitive JavaScript engines that are capable of running full 3D engines, and so on. And finally, WebKit, Blink, and Gecko are all open source. People can be involved in helping find and fix bugs, implement new features, port them to new platforms and devices. A big problem with IE was that it was proprietary, and ran on one platform. You could build a desktop browser that ran on Windows with your own chrome around it, but that was about it. Now, you want to make some cool new device that needs web rendering support? You want to experiment with interesting new ways to present web content? You now have several high-quality, open source options to choose from, which have enough market share that most sites have done the compatibility work to make sure they are compatible. Sorry for the wall of text; I just wanted to make sure that you understand the history, and how very different the present situation is than the one in which the IE 6 monoculture flourished. It can be a bit worrying how two engines with a common ancestor have such dominance on mobile, WebKit and Blink. It's also worrying that Apple's monopoly prevents people from installing browsers with more up-to-date engines on their phones; I think it's an abuse of their control of the platform. But even so, they don't have the kind of market dominance even on smartphones that Microsoft did on desktops back in the early 2000s, so while it's worrying, it's nowhere near as bad.
- scholia 11y agoThere's also Vivaldi, for people who liked Opera before it went to Blink... https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/
- j_s 11y agoPersonal recommendations are appreciated; Wikipedia's pages are rather overwhelming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers I'll add OffByOne for Windows, a demo of an ancient (2006) ActiveX control: http://offbyone.com/offbyone/ http://offbyone.com/offbyone/
- ams6110 11y agoxombrero is my main browser. I like the minimalist, keyboard driven interface.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoArachne is another, it's interesting because it can run on DOS or on Linux without a framebuffer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419516
- chmielewski 11y agoSurprised nobody's mentioned xxxterm or uzbl.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- unexistance 11y agowindows builds http://ci.netsurf-browser.org/builds/windows/ http://ci.netsurf-browser.org/builds/windows/ not mentioned anywhere from download page update: cannot open HN... no Ctrl-L
- j_s 11y agoNot sure what you mean by "no Ctrl-L" (no shortcut to jump to address bar?); most connection issues with off-brand browsers are SSL-related: http://download.netsurf-browser.org/netsurf/releases/ChangeLog.txt http://download.netsurf-browser.org/netsurf/releases/ChangeL... Removed support for all SSL versions due to vulnerabilities.
- Albright 11y agoNetSurf seems to support SSL to the extent that it connected to my site, which scores an A+ on the Qualsys SSL Labs test, without any issues. On the other hand, I agree that not being able to hit Command-L to jump to the address bar as with every other graphical browser (as well as many other browser-like applications) just… doesn't feel right.
- unexistance 11y agoI guess the windows version - no JS - no SSL pretty much impaired anyway, good stuff technology-wise... will be in my radar from time to time
- eis 11y agoIt'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.
- jensen123 11y agoOk, 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.
- smcl 11y agoIs it "NetSurf doesn't support javascript and likely won't" or "Netsurf doesn't support javascript yet"?
- asiekierka 11y agoYet. The Git version seems to already have preliminary JavaScript integration, based on Duktape. There was also an earlier attempt in 2012-13, utilizing SpiderMonkey.
- swiley 11y agoThey're in the process of rewriting the DOM handler to support dynamic changes from JavaScript. JavaScript itself runs well.
- necessity 11y agoIt 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>.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
- splitbrain 11y agoMost sites I tried were somewhat broken. But to my surprise my own website worked just perfectly (sans javascript powered comments and ads of course). And blazingly fast!
- liamzebedee 11y agoForgive me, but why is this on the frontpage?
- lexicality 11y agoYou don't consider somebody writing their own browser from scratch to be frontpage worthy?
- liamzebedee 11y agoFair enough, sorry didn't infer that from the page.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- asiekierka 11y agoNetSurf is not keystroke-centric enough, obviously. (Also, uuterm is much lighter if you want a framebuffer-based terminal, however it needs a patch ( https://github.com/asiekierka/yuyulinux/blob/master/uuterm/uuterm-32bit-blit.diff https://github.com/asiekierka/yuyulinux/blob/master/uuterm/u... ) to support 32-bit FBs properly.)
- amelius 11y agoWhile I applaud competition, I fear that more browsers will make it ever more difficult to develop working code that doesn't break at the next update. I guess the middle ground is that developers are supposed to follow the major browsers, while the small browsers have to follow them too. This could work in practice (I suppose users have gotten used to things breaking on the web), but somehow it still feels like a failure of the field of Software Engineering.
- JupiterMoon 11y agoIsn't this what standards are for? If everyone follows them then no worries..
- amelius 11y agoYes. This is the theory. But haven't you ever seen browser-support tables? For instance, this one: http://caniuse.com/ http://caniuse.com/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- edward 11y agoNetSurf includes multiple framebuffer front ends, including: the Linux framebuffer, SDL, X and VNC. The VNC server surface uses the libvncserver library to provide a straightforward unsecured VNC server. Multiple clients may connect.
- fit2rule 11y agoWonder if this will build on my old BeBox? Might be a reason to turn it on this year ..
- fit2rule 11y agoWonder if this will build on my old BeBox? Might be a reason to turn it on this year ..
- jordigh 11y agoCalled it! "I wouldn't be surprised that now that both of them [Firefox and Chrome] are too complex, in a few more years someone comes out with a browser that is simpler than both of them and is intended to replace them both." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10400540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10400540
- bshimmin 11y agoWell, except that the NetSurf project was started in 2002. Other than that, you were spot on!
- bizarref00l 11y agohttp://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html HV3 Tcl/Tk Web Browser
- copsarebastards 11y agoIs there any analysis of the security of this browser?
- sheenobu 11y agoI'm getting blocked visiting the site... weird. > Your page is blocked due to a security policy that prohibits access to category > Remote Proxies.
- swozey 11y agoProbably because it has browser in the url or something idiotic. Complain to your IT staff who use blanket rules on their gateways,
- awqrre 11y agoAny https website that I visit with netsurf, I get this empty warning: http://imgur.com/7bmDqnP http://imgur.com/7bmDqnP ... but I used the version available in my repo, which is 2.9 .
- oso2k 11y agoThe suckless guys have their webkit-based browser, surf [0]. [0] http://surf.suckless.org/ http://surf.suckless.org/
- nine_k 11y agoPosting this from NetSurf. Pretty neat. Unlike Dillo, NetSurf managed to let me log in to HN, post, and upvote. Currently it is consuming ~50M of RAM, about 10x less than Firefox with the same one tab.