web browser

16 Articles

Your Browser Probably Lies To The Big Sites (Blame Chrome)

May 16, 2026 by 49 Comments

When you visit certain large sites in Firefox or Safari, the browser may detect your visit and change its behavior. It could be as simple as lying about its identity, or it may totally change how it renders the page. But according to a post by [Den Odell], this isn’t a conspiracy between browsers and big Internet — rather, it is a byproduct of Chrome’s dominance.

Here’s how it goes. Chrome puts out a new feature and everyone rushes to implement it on their site. Maybe the new code breaks other browsers. Maybe the other browser supports the feature, but the website doesn’t detect it correctly or is unaware. Maybe it just relies on some quirk of Chrome. Regardless, Firefox and Safari will change to match the site rather than mess up the user’s experience.

If you want to check it out, Firefox will show you what it does and let you disable specific fixes if you visit the about:compat URL. For Safari, you’ll have to read code from a file named quirks. Bugzilla tracks the fixes for Firefox, if you want more details.

Browsers are huge and complex so even niche browsers, today, usually use one of a handful of rendering engines. It seems that the question isn’t if a big company should control the way the web works. It is more a question of which one is currently dominating.

A tab-based terminal window is shown, with the label “brow6l – Hackaday.” The Hackaday website is visible in the upper part of the terminal screen, and in the lower part is a text display containing information about the website and interface information.

Terminal-Based Web Browsing With Modern Conveniences

January 1, 2026 by 16 Comments

Programmers hold to a wide spectrum of positions on software complexity, from the rare command-line purists to the much more common web app developers, and the two extremes rarely meet. One point of contact, though, might be [Jan Antos]’s Brow6el, which uses sixel graphics to display a fully graphical web browser within a terminal.

Behind the scenes, the Chromium Embedded Framework renders webpages headless, then Brow6el uses libsixel to convert the rendered output image to sixels, a simple kind of console-based graphics representation, which it then outputs to the terminal. It regularly re-renders the page to catch page updates and display them in real time, and it can send mouse or keyboard input back to the webpage. For more advanced work, it also has a JavaScript development console, and it’s possibly to manually inject scripts into rendered webpages, or inject them automatically using URL match patterns. Continue reading “Terminal-Based Web Browsing With Modern Conveniences” →

Dillo Turns 25, And Releases A New Version

January 19, 2025 by 13 Comments

The chances are overwhelming, that you are reading this article on a web browser powered by some form of the Blink or WebKit browser engines as used by Google, Apple, and many open source projects, or perhaps the Gecko engine as used by Firefox. At the top end of the web browser world there are now depressingly few maintained browser engines — we think to the detriment of web standards evolution.

Moving away from the big players though, there are several small browser projects which eschew bells and whistles for speed and compactness, and we’re pleased to see that one of the perennial players has released a new version as it passes its quarter century.

Dillo describes itself as ” a fast and small graphical web browser”, and it provides a basic window on the web with a tiny download and the ability to run on very low-end hardware. Without JavaScript and other luxuries it sometimes doesn’t render a site as you’d see it in Chrome or Firefox, but we’re guessing many users would relish some escape from the web’s cycle-sucking garbage. The new version 3.2.0 brings bug fixes, as well as math formula rendering, and navigation improvements.

The special thing about Dillo is that this is a project which came back from the dead. We reported last year how a developer resurrected it after a previous release back in 2015, and it seems that for now at least it has a healthy future. So put it on your retro PC, your original Raspberry Pi, or your Atari if you have one, and try it on your modern desktop if you need reminding just how fast web browsing can be.

This isn’t the only interesting browser project on the block, we’re also keeping an eye on Ladybird, which is aiming for those big players rather than simplicity like Dillo.

Thanks [Feinfinger] for the tip.

Ask Hackaday: Has Firefox Finally Gone Too Far?

July 14, 2024 by 119 Comments

In a world where so much of our lives depend on the use of online services, the web browser used to access those services becomes of crucial importance. It becomes a question of whether we trust the huge corporate interests which control this software with such access to our daily lives, and it is vital that the browser world remains a playing field with many players in the game.

The mantle has traditionally fallen upon Mozilla’s Firefox browser to represent freedom from corporate ownership, but over the last couple of years even they have edged away from their open source ethos and morphed into an advertising company that happens to have a browser. We’re asking you: can we still trust Mozilla’s Firefox, when the latest version turns on ad measurement by default?

Such has been the dominance of Google’s Chromium in the browser world, that it becomes difficult to find alternatives which aren’t based on it. We can see the attraction for developers, instead of pursuing the extremely hard task of developing a new browser engine, just use one off-the-shelf upon which someone else has already done the work. As a result, once you have discounted browsers such as the venerable Netsurf or Dillo which are cool as heck but relatively useless for modern websites, the choices quickly descend into the esoteric. There are Ladybird and Servo which are both promising but still too rough around the edges for everyday use, so what’s left? Probably LibreWolf represents the best option, a version of Firefox with a focus on privacy and security.

We’re interested in your views on this topic, because we know you’ll have a lot to say about it. Meanwhile if you’re a Firefox user who’s upgraded to version 128 and you’re not sure what to do, don’t panic. Find the settings page, go to “Privacy and Security”, and un-check the “Website Advertising Preferences” checkbox.

The Minimalistic Dillo Web Browser Is Back

May 11, 2024 by 21 Comments

Over the decades web browsers have changed from the fairly lightweight and nimble HTML document viewers of the 1990s to today’s top-heavy browsers that struggle to run on a system with less than a quad-core, multi-GHz CPU and gigabytes of RAM. All but a few, that is.

Dillo is one of a small number of browsers that requires only a minimum of system resources and will happily run on an Intel 486 or thereabouts. Sadly, the project more or less ended back in 2016 when the rendering engine’s developer passed away, but with the recent 3.10 release the project seems to be back on track, courtesy of efforts by [Rodrigo Arias Mallo].

Although a number of forks were started after the Dillo project ground to a halt, of these only Dillo+ appears to be active at this point in time, making this project revival a welcome boost, as is its porting to Atari systems. As for Dillo’s feature set, it boasts support for a range of protocols, including Gopher, HTTP(S), Gemini, and FTP via extensions. It supports HTML 4.01 and some HTML 5, along with CSS 2.1 and some CSS 3 features, and of course no JavaScript.

On today’s JS-crazed web this means access can be somewhat limited, but maybe it will promote websites to have a no-JS fallback for the Dillo users. The source code and releases can be obtained from the GitHub project page, with contributions to the project gracefully accepted.

Thanks to [Prof. Dr. Feinfinger] for the tip.

The Modern WWW, Or: Where Do We Want To Go From Here?

April 27, 2023 by 52 Comments

From the early days of ARPANET until the dawn of the World Wide Web (WWW), the internet was primarily the domain of researchers, teachers and students, with hobbyists running their own BBS servers you could dial into, yet not connected to the internet. Pitched in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN, the WWW was intended as an information management system that’d provide standardized access to information using HTTP as the transfer protocol and HTML and later CSS to create formatted documents inspired by the SGML standard. Even better, it allowed for WWW forums and personal websites to begin to pop up, enabling the eternal joy of web rings, animated GIFs and forums on any conceivable topic.

During the early 90s, as the newly opened WWW began to gain traction with the public, the Mosaic browser formed the backbone of the WWW browsers (‘web browsers’) of the time, including Internet Explorer – which licensed the Mosaic code – and the Mosaic-based Netscape Navigator. With the WWW standards set by the – Berners-Lee-founded – World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the stage appeared to be set for an open and fair playing field for all. What we got instead was the brawl referred to as the ‘browser wars‘, which – although changed – continues to this day.

Today it isn’t Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that’s ruling the WWW while setting the course for new web standards, but instead we have Google’s Chrome browser partying like it’s the early 2000s and it’s wearing an IE mask. With former competitors like Opera and Microsoft having switched to the Chromium browser engine that underlies Chrome, what does this tell us about the chances for alternative browsers and the future of the WWW?

Continue reading “The Modern WWW, Or: Where Do We Want To Go From Here?” →

Netscape Navigator 1.0

So, Why Are Hyperlinks Blue, Anyway?

September 16, 2021 by 44 Comments

You’ve no doubt noticed by now that while some links are gold and/or bold, most links out there are blue, especially on web pages of yore. But why? the TL;DR answer is that the Mosaic browser, released in early 1993 used blue links, and since the browser was widely distributed, blue just became the norm. Okay, fine. But why did they choose blue? That’s a question that requires a deep dive into technology through the ages as the Web and personal computing developed in tandem.

It’s important to remember that the idea of hyperlinks predates the invention of color monitors, which thickens the plot a bit. But the pivotal point seems to be Windows 3.1, released April 6th, 1992, when hyperlink blue becomes a navigational and interactive color. A year later, the April 12, 1993 release notes for Mosaic include a bullet that becomes the point of origin for blue hyperlinks:

Changed default anchor representations: blue and single solid underline for unvisited, dark purple and single dashed underline for visited.Mosaic release notes

Around the same time, the Cello browser was developed at Cornell Law, which also used blue hyperlinks. So the blue hyperlink concept was arguably browser-agnostic even before Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer came along.

The writer speculates that blue was chosen to stand out against black and white once color monitors took over, and that seems legit to us. Can you imagine blue hyperlinks on Hackaday, though? Ouch.

Speaking of important questions in computing history — who invented the mouse?