Tiny Browsers for Embedded Systems

October 5, 2007 1-minute read

Ok I am starting to look around for suitable applications for my embedded like desktop distribution. Ideally I would like a xhtml/css/javascript compliant browser which is still lightweight.

The well known text browser like lynx, w3m, elinks, links or links2 (known for it’s graphic -g mode) are not really what I want.

So I checked the current status of dillo and noticed that the long awaited release of the FLTK2 port finally happened.

Another more advanced rendering engine is tkhtml3 and it’s corresponding browser hv3 which even passes the ACID2 test. It uses libsee for the javascript support. As the name suggests a rather big part of the browser is written in Tcl using the Tk UI-toolkit, the core rendering engine is however implemented in C. A statically compiled hv3 with all dependencies (Tcl,Tk,libsee) is about ~3.4M. I asked Dan Kennedy the maintainer whether it would be possible to port it to a different toolkit and get rid of Tcl, he thinks it should be doable, however according to him replacing the browser functionality which is written in Tcl is a rather big undertaking. As I currently both lack the required skills and time I won’t even try it right now.

Marc