NetSurf – A Graphical Web Browser for Command Line (+CSS Support)

To be honest, Modern web pages ain’t look pretty in CLI web browsers. Up until yesterday, the most kick-ass web browsing experience I had in Console was w3m with image viewing enabled. I was under the impression that this was the best that CLI web browsers could do. However, all that changed when I stumbled upon NetSurf; a venerable independent web browser that has been around for nearly a decade and is available for many Platforms such as RISC OS, Amiga, BeOS, and UNIX-like systems (For both GTK and Framebuffer front-ends). Below is a screenshot of NetSurf FrameBuffer front-end in Debian on my Asus EeePC:

Believe me or not, the above picture is neither photoshoped nor produced in WMs, it’s just a pic of NetSurf running on Framebuffer. The whole browser and all its dependencies roughly measures 5 MB. NetSurf utilizes no bloated Window Managers and still it supports HTML 4, CSS 2.1, HTTPS, Unicode content and many other features. Furthermore, the development seems propitious with HTML 5 and JavaScript support under progress.

If you are asking me, NetSurf is a rarity, perhaps an unmatched commodity. There are some rendering problems on my machine but I take them as foibles. The only reproach that I have to set against its abundant awesomeness is the lack of features like JavaScript support or extensions that you’d expect from a modern web browser but fortunately they are under development.

Installation

The best possible way to install NetSurf is compiling from source code. There are some binary packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Puppy Linux, Slackware, etc (check out here) but they are most likely spiked with GTK libraries which are of no interest here.
The real squalor in NetSurf compiling process is the drudgery of installing all its dependencies. There is no single resource that lists all the dependencies and libraries you need to install (Now I wish I had taken a note of all the things I installed). However don’t panic. If you take it step by step you are going to be fine.

• Head to this page and download all the libraries that are listed on the top of the website (exclude ones that are for RISC OS) and compile each of them as usual. For example, start with LibCSS and do the following:

tar –zxvf libcss-0.0.2-src.tar.gz
cd libcss-0.0.2-src
make
make install

Do the same thing for all the other libraries. Some libraries may complain that you don’t have some binary libraries (like XCB and SDL) installed; which means you should install them first. When you have all the libraries compiled and installed you can move to next step which is compiling the NetSurf source code.

• Go here and grab a copy of  NetSurf’s source code.

cd netsurf
make TARGET=framebuffer
make TARGET=framebuffer install

If the compilation is successful then you should be able to run NetSurf now. Happy (without-X) web surfing and if you have any questions or ideas, feel free to leave a comment.