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O O \ / O —— Cr —— O / \ O O |
Carbonyl |
Carbonyl is a Chromium based browser built to run in a terminal. Read the blog post.
It supports pretty much all Web APIs including WebGL, WebGPU, audio and video playback, animations, etc..
It's snappy, starts in less than a second, runs at 60 FPS, and idles at 0% CPU usage. It does not require a window server (i.e. works in a safe-mode console), and even runs through SSH.
Carbonyl originally started as html2svg
and is now the runtime behind it.
Usage
# Watch YouTube inside a Docker container
$ docker run -ti fathyb/carbonyl https://youtube.com
Demo
Know issues
- Fullscreen mode not supported yet
Comparisons
Lynx
Lynx is the OG terminal web browser, and the oldest one still maintained.
Pros
- When it understands a page, Lynx has the best layout, fully optimized for the terminal
Cons
Some might sound like pluses, but Browsh and Carbonyl let you disable most of those if you'd like
- Does not support a lot of modern web standards
- Cannot run JavaScript/WebAssembly
- Cannot view or play medias (audio, video, DOOM)
Browsh
Browsh is the OG "normal browser into a terminal" project. It starts Firefox in headless mode and connects to it through an automation protocol.
Pro
- It's easier to update the underlying browser: just update Firefox
- This makes development easier: just install Firefox and compile the Go code in a few seconds
- As of today, Browsh supports extensions while Carbonyl doesn't, although it's on our roadmap
Cons
- It runs slower and requires more resources than Carbonyl. 50x more CPU power is needed for the same content in average, that's because Carbonyl does not downscale or copy the window framebuffer, it natively renders to the terminal resolution.
- It uses custom stylesheets to fix the layout, which is less reliable than Carbonyl's changes to its HTML engine (Blink).
Development
Few notes:
- You need to build Chromium
- Building Carbonyl is almost the same as building Chromium with extra steps to patch and bundle the Rust library. Scripts in the
scripts/
directory are simple wrappers aroundgn
,ninja
, etc.. - Building Chromium for arm64 on Linux requires an amd64 processor
- Carbonyl is only tested on Linux and macOS, other platforms likely require code changes to Chromium
- Chromium is huge and takes a long time to build, making your computer mostly unresponsive. An 8-core CPU such as an M1 Max or an i9 9900k with 10 Gbps fiber takes around ~1 hour to fetch and build. It requires around 100 GB of disk space.
Fetch
Fetch Chromium's code.
$ ./scripts/gclient.sh sync
Apply patches
Any changes made to Chromium will be reverted, make sure to save any changes you made.
$ ./scripts/patches.sh apply
Configure
$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/Default
Default
is the target name, you can use multiple ones and pick any name you'd like, i.e.:$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/release $ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/debug # or if you'd like to build a multi-platform image $ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/arm64 $ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/amd64
When prompted, enter the following arguments:
import("//carbonyl/src/browser/args.gn")
# uncomment this to build for arm64
# target_cpu="arm64"
# uncomment this to enable ccache
# cc_wrapper="env CCACHE_SLOPPINESS=time_macros ccache"
# uncomment this if you're building for macOS
# use_lld=false
# uncomment this for a release build
# is_debug=false
# symbol_level=0
Build binaries
$ ./scripts/build.sh Default
This should produce the following outputs:
out/Default/headless_shell
: browser binaryout/Default/icudtl.dat
out/Default/libEGL.so
out/Default/libGLESv2.so
out/Default/v8_context_snapshot.bin
Build Docker image
# Build arm64 Docker image using binaries from the Default target
$ ./scripts/docker-build.sh Default arm64
# Build amd64 Docker image using binaries from the Default target
$ ./scripts/docker-build.sh Default amd64
Run
$ ./scripts/run.sh Default https://wikipedia.org