Search About NetSurf Home » About NetSurf News Screenshots About NetSurf Team NetSurf is a free, open source web browser. It is written in C and released under the GNU Public Licence version 2. NetSurf has its own Awards layout and rendering engine entirely written from scratch. It is small and capable of handling many of the web standards in use today. Licence Thanks Downloads Project Goals Ports & Availability Documentation The NetSurf project's goals and aims are: This section explains the various NetSurf front ends and should Development cover whether NetSurf is available for your system. NetSurf area 1. Have fun currently has seven different front ends. These are for RISC OS, NetSurf is developed in people's spare time, so our main goal is to GTK, BeOS, AmigaOS, Atari, Mac OS X and dumb framebuffers. Webmaster area have fun – hopefully learning something and creating a product Contact that people find useful along the way. If you want to join in, check Desktop front ends out the developer and contributor area! 2. Adhere to the standards The RISC OS front end is suitable for RISC OS 4 and greater. The English There are many web standards. HTTP, HTML and CSS are just a AmigaOS front end is suitable for AmigaOS 4. The BeOS front end few of them, and new specifications appearing all the time. The works on BeOS, Zeta and Haiku. The Mac OS X port requires at least NetSurf team is devoted to implementing these standards. version 10.5. Development wiki 3. Superior user experience Git repository viewer We want NetSurf to provide a consistent interface to the user that Continuous Integration fits right in with your desktop environment. We aim to make Bug report system NetSurf's interface clean and simple while providing access to Code documentation powerful functionality. 4. Keep NetSurf small NetSurf is a web browser with a small footprint, and we want to keep it that way. 5. Portability We want NetSurf to be available to as many users as possible. We've already seen ports to handheld devices and would like to NetSurf's GTK front end showing help anyone attempting a new port. the BBC Homepage. 6. Modularity NetSurf's GTK front end works on Unix-like systems, including Linux, Many of of the components designed for NetSurf are available FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris and others. There are no native Windows separately, so that others might use them in their own projects. or MacOS X ports of NetSurf at the moment, however the GTK front end can be built for those platforms. The GTK front end is available from the package repositories of many Linux distributions including Project History Debian and Ubuntu. The NetSurf project was started in April 2002 in response to a Framebuffer front end discussion of the deficiencies of the RISC OS browsers that were available at the time. NetSurf has been developed continuously ever NetSurf's framebuffer front end has no particular operating system since. The latest features and bug fixes have always been available or GUI toolkit requirements. Its mouse pointer, all its widgets etc, immediately to users through the project's autobuilder. NetSurf had are drawn though NetSurf's internal plotters, the same rendering become the most widely used browser on RISC OS well before interface used to draw web pages. This makes the framebuffer front NetSurf's first release, version 1.0, on 17th May 2007. Development end highly portable. Currently the framebuffer front end can target builds have continued to be more widely used than release versions the following framebuffer surface providers: by RISC OS users. The Linux framebuffer Output to a Linux framebuffer and input from Linux input event device nodes. The output device may be specified and defaults to /dev/fb0. The input node search path may also be specified, and defaults to /dev/input/. SDL The SDL surface is a straightforward port to the SDL library which is available for many operating systems. This allows the framebuffer NetSurf front end to be run inside a desktop window, making development easier. An old version from April 2004 X displaying the Drobe web site in The X surface uses the XCB. This allows the framebuffer NetSurf March 2009. front end to be run inside an X desktop window, making development easier. A GTK port was started in June 2004, which runs on Unix-like VNC platforms. Initially this port was created in order to aid the The VNC server surface uses the libvncserver library to provide a development and testing of the RISC OS version. Over time, the GTK straightforward unsecured VNC server. Multiple clients may port has become a fully fledged part of the project and cemented connect. NetSurf's commitment to portability. The ABLE framebuffer This surface handler enables NetSurf's framebuffer front end to run directly on the ABLE bootloader, shipped with hardware from NetSurf's exuberant throbber Simtec. animation in 2004. Releases vs Development trunk NetSurf has now been ported to many more platforms with native Users can run our release versions of NetSurf, or they can run front ends being created for BeOS & Haiku, as well as AmigaOS 4. A development versions. Our release versions are tested and released dumb framebuffer port also exists, which has no particular operating when we are happy with them. Development versions are system or GUI toolkit requirements. snapshots of the current state of the code, as the developers are Timeline working on it. These versions may have newer features or bug fixes that haven't made it into a release yet, however (depending on Some of the major events and changes in the project's history are what the developers are doing) they might also have new bugs, chronicled below. instability, or they may produce reams of debugging output. We recommend users use the release versions, unless they Apr 2002 NetSurf project started particularly want to help us by reporting issues with development Jun 2004 GTK port available versions. People building NetSurf from source are encouraged to May 2007 NetSurf 1.0 released build the current HEAD, rather than a release, as it is most up-to- Jun 2007 NetSurf packaged in Debian date and has features that may not yet have been released. Jun 2007 Hubbub HTML parser started Jul 2007 LibDOM DOM implementation started Aug 2007 NetSurf 1.1 released NetSurf in Action Jan 2008 NetSurf web site redesigned and rewritten Since NetSurf started out on RISC OS hardware, which is not Mar 2008 NetSurf 1.2 released particularly fast – the most widely used RISC OS hardware is a 200 May 2008 LibCSS CSS parser started MHz StrongARM RiscPC – so it runs well on resource constrained Jun 2008 BeOS & Haiku port available hardware such as handhelds. Even on fast modern desktops, users Aug 2008 AmigaOS 4 port available benefit from NetSurf's efficiency through its fast startup time and lightweight approach. Aug 2008 Hubbub used in NetSurf builds Sep 2008 Framebuffer port available Apr 2009 NetSurf 2.0 released May 2009 NetSurf 2.1 released Jul 2009 LibCSS used in NetSurf builds Mar 2010 New cache designed and used in NetSurf Apr 2010 NetSurf 2.5 released Sep 2010 NetSurf 2.6 released Jan 2011 Atari port available Jan 2011 Mac OS X port available The image above shows NetSurf's framebuffer front end running on top of a Simtec DePicture's bootloader! It's using an ARM9-based Apr 2011 NetSurf 2.7 released Samsung S3C2440 CPU running at 400 MHz. Sep 2011 Frames and iframes in NetSurf core Sep 2011 NetSurf 2.8 released People also use NetSurf on other handheld gadgets, such as the Mar 2012 LibDOM used in NetSurf builds Openmoko mobile phone and the Nokia N810 internet tablet. NetSurf's full page scaling abilities help it to make the best use of a Apr 2012 NetSurf 2.9 released small screen. Sep 2012 Early JavaScript support started Feb 2013 Textarea widget used for HTML forms Apr 2013 NetSurf 3.0 released Want to help? Sep 2013 Redesigned treeviews Dec 2013 Big LibCSS selection speedup The NetSurf project needs help and input if it is to keep moving Apr 2014 NetSurf 3.1 released forward. There are many ways for users to contribute to the NetSurf project. One of the simplest is to try the latest development build May 2014 Added disc cache feature regularly. If you find any bugs, features you like or changes you Aug 2014 NetSurf 3.2 released don't like you can give feedback to the developers. It is this Mar 2015 NetSurf 3.3 released valuable feedback that helps shape NetSurf into a program people Aug 2015 Changed JavaScript engine to Duktape enjoy using. Feb 2016 NetSurf 3.4 released Visit the "How can I help?" page to see other ideas for contributing Apr 2016 NetSurf 3.5 released to the project. If you can program and you'd like to improve NetSurf, Nov 2016 NetSurf 3.6 released then we'd love to hear from you. Pick an area you'd like to improve Oct 2017 NetSurf 3.7 released or a feature you want to add and contact the developers. Also, take a look at the developer and contributor area of this site. A more recent NetSurf showing Wikipedia. Get the latest version from our download section. Copyright 2003 - 2016 The NetSurf Developers.