Pretty much this. - Write the networking code to retrieve data from servers. I'd start with GET requests to keep it simple. This part is not that bad and its a

Pretty much this. - Write the networking code to retrieve data from servers. I'd start with GET requests to keep it simple. This part is not that bad and its actually pretty fun. Doing it in Python is very simple and straightforward. - Write browser GUI because its a native application. This depends on what language you use for the task. If Python, you can get away with tkinter (flame suit on) for a very simple prototype. I believe tkinter is single threaded and that may turn out to be an issue (don't remember). - Write a simple rendering engine to display the text. No need to do this inside of the GUI code because the output can be read through the console. You are pretty much reading the raw html and extracting the bits you want. - Plug in the rendering engine into a GUI widget. Since this is a (assumed) read-only browser, you can get away with a simple textbox of sorts. Anything else will require a custom widget. At this point you have a very minimal browser. Adding CSS, javascript, etc requires that you include a pipeline to route data through the proper channels before it reaches the GUI. This is where the bulk of the work goes. Bring beer. :)