What is Smolsurf?

Smolsurf is a text-based web browser, which means it only renders web pages as text and can be run from the command line. Currently it's just a toy project for me to mess around with, and I might make several breaking changes in the future.

Aims

• Neat for reading document sites.
• Works well in low bandwidth internet.
• Works well in potato machines (though this would require migrating from Node.js).
• Rewrite most if not everything from scratch.

What we currently have:

• A text-based command line interface.
• A new html engine that does not follow any standards.
• Cross-platform support as long as Node.js is supported.

Using Smolsurf

You can download a binary from the releases page, run compiled distribution, or build from source.

Build from source

1. Install Node.js & npm.
2. Clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/nguyenphuminh/smolsurf

3. Install dev dependencies:

npm install

4. Build:

npm run build

But of course you can just do this to run directly in Node.js:

node .

Short-term todos

• Support more HTML tags.
• Support more encoded entities.
• Make the UI less terrible.
• idk it is kind of a mess right now so there are a lot of bugs to fix.
• Port to Rust or Go.

Copyrights

Copyrights © 2025 Nguyen Phu Minh.

This project is licensed under the GPL-3.0 License.