wb: A Rust repository from the-homeless-god

wb is a Chromium based browser built to run in a terminal. Read the blog post.

It supports pretty much all Web APIs including WebGL, WebGPU, audio and video playback, animations, etc..

It's snappy, starts in less than a second, runs at 60 FPS, and idles at 0% CPU usage. It does not require a window server (i.e. works in a safe-mode console), and even runs through SSH.

Based on html2svg and is now the runtime behind it.

Usage

wb on Linux without Docker requires the same dependencies as Chromium.

Docker

$ docker run --rm -ti the-homeless-god/wb https://youtube.com

npm

$ npm install --global wb
$ wb https://github.com

Binaries

Demo

Wikipedia.mp4	Doom.mp4
YouTube.mp4

Known issues

Fullscreen mode not supported yet

Comparisons

Feature	Lynx	Browsh
Type	Terminal web browser	Browser into a terminal
Age	Oldest and still maintained	Original "normal browser into a terminal"
Layout Optimization	Best layout when it understands a page	Custom stylesheets to fix layout
Web Standards Support	Limited support for modern web standards	Utilizes Firefox in headless mode
JavaScript/WebAssembly	Not supported	Not supported
Media Support	Cannot view or play media (audio, video, DOOM)	Depends on underlying browser (Firefox)
Extension Support	N/A	Supports extensions (as of today)
Resource Usage	N/A	Slower and requires more resources than `wb`
Development Ease	N/A	Easier to update underlying browser

Operating System Support

As far as tested, the operating systems under are supported:

Linux (Debian, Ubuntu and Arch tested)
MacOS
Windows 11 and WSL

Contributing

Carbonyl is split in two parts: the "core" which is built into a shared library (libcarbonyl), and the "runtime" which dynamically loads the core (carbonyl executable).

The core is written in Rust and takes a few seconds to build from scratch. The runtime is a modified version of the Chromium headless shell and takes more than an hour to build from scratch.

If you're just making changes to the Rust code, build libcarbonyl and replace it in a release version of Carbonyl.

Core

$ cargo build

Runtime

Few notes:

Building the runtime is almost the same as building Chromium with extra steps to patch and bundle the Rust library. Scripts in the scripts/ directory are simple wrappers around gn, ninja, etc..
Building Chromium for arm64 on Linux requires an amd64 processor
Carbonyl is only tested on Linux and macOS, other platforms likely require code changes to Chromium
Chromium is huge and takes a long time to build, making your computer mostly unresponsive. An 8-core CPU such as an M1 Max or an i9 9900k with 10 Gbps fiber takes around ~1 hour to fetch and build. It requires around 100 GB of disk space.

Fetch

Fetch Chromium's code.

$ ./scripts/gclient.sh sync

Apply patches

Any changes made to Chromium will be reverted, make sure to save any changes you made.

$ ./scripts/patches.sh apply

Configure

$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/Default

Default is the target name, you can use multiple ones and pick any name you'd like, i.e.:

$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/release
$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/debug
# or if you'd like to build a multi-platform image
$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/arm64
$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/amd64

When prompted, enter the following arguments:

import("//carbonyl/src/browser/args.gn")

# uncomment this to build for arm64
# target_cpu = "arm64"

# comment this to disable ccache
cc_wrapper = "env CCACHE_SLOPPINESS=time_macros ccache"

# comment this for a debug build
is_debug = false
symbol_level = 0
is_official_build = true

Build binaries

$ ./scripts/build.sh Default

This should produce the following outputs:

out/Default/headless_shell: browser binary
out/Default/icudtl.dat
out/Default/libEGL.so
out/Default/libGLESv2.so
out/Default/v8_context_snapshot.bin

Build Docker image

# Build arm64 Docker image using binaries from the Default target
$ ./scripts/docker-build.sh Default arm64
# Build amd64 Docker image using binaries from the Default target
$ ./scripts/docker-build.sh Default amd64

Run

$ ./scripts/run.sh Default https://wikipedia.org