At the Hackaday Europe conference in Italy earlier in the year, we were shown a rather interesting device. The work of [Alun Morris], it was an ESP32-powered Cheap Black Display board, and it was running a web browser. Definitely an achievement.

Lest you imagine that it was sporting the latest and greatest in browser technology, we must disappoint you. The browser in question is a very basic text mode device, but it did happily retrieve Hackaday, which should be the only test a browser should need to pass.

Under the hood it’s running FreeRTOS, with separate HTML retrieval and tokenizing, and UI processes. It can fetch web pages directly, but there’s also a server-side proxy for difficult sites, and for creating image thumbnails.

An ESP32 is a powerful microcontroller, but it’s fair to say it’s not in the league of running a web browser and as far as we can remember this is the first one we’ve seen. We’re sure it’s a field with further progress to be made though, particularly with the more powerful recent chips in the series. This project however is a good start, and more importantly it can be yours for a few dollars on Ali to buy a dev board. What are you waiting for?