A Modern Browser For The PlayStation Portable

October 13, 2026 by Jenny List 16 Comments

The Sony PlayStation Portable, better known as the PSP, is now over two decades old. In its day it was an impressive handheld gaming machine, not least because of the inclusion of wireless networking and a web browser.

We tried the browser back then, and it’s fair to say the experience was a little underwhelming. We’re thus mightily impressed at [Steve Janovitz], who has produced Tilefinch — a modern web browser for the PSP.

Depending on the model, the PSP came with a 333 MHz MIPS32 processor, and for all but the first model, 64 MB of RAM. Powerful back in 2004,but leagues behind something that would run any modern web browser. So how’s he doing it? The answer seems to be by careful choice of software components and use of the PSP’s built-in capabilities for jobs such as video decoding. The browser engine is Lexbor for example, while JavaScript is handled by QuickJS.

We don’t have a PSP to hand so we can’t tell how it would render Hackaday or even how fast it is, but we’re suitably impressed by this project. For PSP enthusiasts it’s a game-changing browser, but for us it also points the way towards web browsing being a possibility for other platforms. As the distinction between a high-end microcontroller and a low-end SoC becomes blurred, we’re starting to see exciting new hardware emerging with devices such as Espressif’s ESP32-P4 that, on paper at least, might be capable of running this browser. Exciting times in limited hardware web browsing might be upon us.

It’s GNU Radio Companion, But In The Browser

September 9, 2026 by Jenny List 15 Comments

The progression of the web browser from a tool for simple static information browsing into a do-everything computing environment has been inexorable, with package after package making the jump. Today it’s the turn of GNU Radio Companion, lowering the barrier to software defined radio considerably. It’s the work of [Marc Lichtman], who’s name you may recall if you have ever used pysdr.org.

Loading it up gives you a very familiar window if you’re used to GNU Radio Companion, and it comes with a set of example flowgraphs that cover a large range of applications. It supports a collection of software-defined radios (SDRs) including the well-known RTL-SDR, and if that’s not enough it can also use your sound card. There is even a set of recorded off-air captures to experiment with.

We’ve spent a while here playing with it, and it does everything we’re used to from the version outside the browser. The only thing we’re told it won’t do is work with a networked SDR, but that’s no deal breaker.

Thanks [Marcus Müller] for the tip.

A 1990s Homebrew OS With GUI And Web Browser, In AM29000 Machine Code

August 24, 2026 by Jenny List 11 Comments

The AM29000 series of processors were AMD’s entry into the world of super-fast next-generation silicon of the late 1980s. It was a time when ARM was still a niche architecture in a British educational computer, the 68000 series was still a major player, and it was by no means certain that the x86 would maintain its position. It therefore wasn’t an unreasonable choice for someone building a high performance computer at the time, which is what [Oscar Toledo G.] and his father did. If that wasn’t enough, he went on to write an operating system for it in AM29000 assembly, complete with a GUI, a C compiler, and an up-to-date web browser for the late 1990s. The story makes for an engaging read.

It’s written across two parts, with the first looking at the computer and the early software development, and the second at the C compiler and web browser. It’s a tale of epic mastery of the machine, and something we remember ourselves, piecing together knowledge in a time before the Internet placed it all at our fingertips. Tales such as hand porting — we can’t really say compiling — C code into AM29000 machine code are completely next-level. You have to read these two write-ups, and there’s even an in-browser emulator should you want to try it.

Meanwhile, in case you think something is a little familiar here, he’s the same person who brought us a Transputer in the browser.

The ESP32 Gets A Web Browser

July 29, 2026 by Jenny List 34 Comments

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?

Continue reading “The ESP32 Gets A Web Browser” →

MacSurf Hits 2.0 To Bring PowerPCs Back Online

July 17, 2026 by Tyler August 11 Comments

There’s an interesting thing about retrocomputing — the moment that you realize your 25-year-old machine can do almost everything your average person uses a computer for. The problem is that the average person mostly uses a computer as an internet appliance, and the big missing piece for most old machines is hooking up to the modern internet. HTTPS is good to have, but isn’t so easy to implement when your browser gets megabytes of RAM instead of gigabytes.

That’s why MacSurf by [mplsllc] is so interesting, especially version 2.0 just released-– its explicit goal is to get as much of the modern web onto an OS 9 equipped PowerPC Macintosh as physically possible.

Before you get too excited– no, you won’t be hitting up YouTube.com or even GitHub. That’s just too big and bloated now, even if you can get past the HTTPS hurdle. You will, however, be able to access, say MacintoshGarden.org, whose out-of-order HTTPS certificates sent the last version for a tizzy. The forums at 68kMLA work, and threads load quickly thanks to the as-needed image loading added this version.

Other nice things added include a proper history and bookmark manager. There’s still no tab support, but have you seen the modern web? You’re not fitting more than one webpage into RAM on a G3 no matter how hard you try. You can, however, download the web browser directly from the http-only MacSurf.org homepage.

We featured the first release of this netsurf-based browser, and have to admit we’re impressed with the speed of development. If you want a totally modern system on PPC instead of just an up-to-date browser, you might want to check out MorphOS.

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

May 16, 2026 by Al Williams 50 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 Aaron Beckendorf 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” →