NetSurf

★★★☆☆

I was surprised to find that NetSurf is still around and being developed! It’s another independent browser like Dillo that goes waaaay back (as you might guess from its website), but never caught on outside a small niche.

It is, however, fast and light – and while it doesn’t support the full range of website capabilities that a modern Chromium, Gecko or WebKit browser does, it’s got some minimal JavaScript support (off by default) and can handle enough CSS to display older websites and sites that aren’t too complex. (And unlike Dillo, it seems to handle emoji consistently on Linux!)

For the most part, sites that are still mainly documents tend to be readable at least (even if they don’t look right), while sites that are mainly applications…well, I can’t even log into Nextcloud, Dropbox, or GMail even after enabling JavaScript. I can log into Wallabag and read saved articles, but can’t add new ones. Flickr confuses it terribly, and it doesn’t even know where to start with OpenStreetMap. My WordPress/ClassicPress theme (SemPress) displays fine, but I can’t log into the dashboard.

Ironically, I couldn’t sign up for the NetSurf users mailing list using NetSurf. The list provider thought I was a bot!

There are a few incomplete features that can be frustrating. For example, you can edit the name of a bookmark, but I haven’t found a way to edit where it points to. I was really hoping I could use bookmarklets for a few things since there aren’t any extensions.

Overall it’s a little more capable than Dillo, but a bit slower. Either would be good to keep on hand for low-spec hardware, with a more “mainstream” browser when you need it. (Falkon’s a good choice, since it’s light for a Chromium browser and available on most of the same platforms.)

The web would be more usable overall if more developers tested their sites in a browser like this one.

Availability

NetSurf started out on RISC-OS, and the ports to Linux/Unix, AmigaOS and Haiku are all active, though the Haiku port is missing a few features like being able to change settings (which means you can’t turn on JavaScript). Debian still includes it in their native repository, and there’s a Flatpak with the latest version for other Linux distros.