Carbonyl is a Chromium-based browser that runs in the terminal.It supports almost all Web APIs, including WebGL, WebGPU, audio and video playback, animation, and more.

It’s fast, starting in under a second, running at 60 FPS, and 0% CPU usage when idle. It doesn’t require a window server (ie works in a safe mode console) and can even be run over SSH.

# Watch YouTube inside a Docker container
$ docker run -ti fathyb/carbonyl https://youtube.com

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Lynx is the OG terminal web browser,It is also the oldest browser still maintained.

advantage

• Lynx has the best layout when it understands a page, fully optimized for the terminal

shortcoming

Some might sound like pros, but Browsh and Carbonyl let you disable most of them if you want

• Does not support many modern web standards
• Unable to run JavaScript/WebAssembly
• Unable to view or play media (audio, video, DOOM)

Browsh is OG’s “normal browser into a terminal” item. It starts with headless mode to start Firefox and connect to it via the automation protocol.

advantage

• Updating the underlying browser is easier: just update Firefox
• This makes development easier: just install Firefox and compile Go code in seconds
• As of today, Browsh supports extensions while Carbonyl does not, but the feature is on the roadmap

shortcoming

• It runs slower and requires more resources than Carbonyl. The same content requires an average of 50x more CPU processing power because Carbonyl does not downscale or duplicate the window framebuffer, it natively renders to the target resolution.
• It uses a custom stylesheet to fix the layout, which is not as reliable as Carbonyl’s changes to its HTML engine (Blink).

about Carbonyl’sA few notes:

• Need to build Chromium
• Building Carbonyl is pretty much the same as building Chromium, with the added step of patching and bundling the Rust library.scripts/The scripts in the directory are aroundgn,ninjaEtc. simple package.
• Building Chromium for arm64 on Linux requires an amd64 processor
• Carbonyl is only tested on Linux and macOS, other platforms may require code changes for Chromium
• Chromium is huge, takes a long time to build, and makes your computer nearly unresponsive. An 8-core CPU such as an M1 Max or i9 9900k with 10 Gbps fiber takes about 1 hour to acquire and build. It requires approximately 100 GB of disk space.