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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
Carbonyl on Linux without Docker requires the same dependencies as Chromium.
Docker
$ docker run --rm -ti fathyb/carbonyl https://youtube.com
npm
$ npm install --global carbonyl
$ carbonyl https://github.com
Binaries
Demo
Known issues
- Fullscreen mode not supported yet
Comparisons
Lynx
Lynx is the original 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 media (audio, video, DOOM)
Browsh
Browsh is the original "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).
Operating System Support
As far as tested, the operating systems under are supported:
- Linux (Debian, Ubuntu and Arch tested)
- MacOS
- Windows 11 and WSL
Contributing
Carbonyl is split in two parts: the "core" which is built into a shared library (libcarbonyl), and the "runtime" which dynamically loads the core (carbonyl executable).
The core is written in Rust and takes a few seconds to build from scratch. The runtime is a modified version of the Chromium headless shell and takes more than an hour to build from scratch.
If you're just making changes to the Rust code, build libcarbonyl and replace it in a release version of Carbonyl.
Core
$ cargo build
Runtime
Few notes:
- Building the runtime 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 around gn, 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
$ ./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"
# comment this to disable ccache
cc_wrapper = "env CCACHE_SLOPPINESS=time_macros ccache"
# comment this for a debug build
is_debug = false
symbol_level = 0
is_official_build = true
Build binaries
$ ./scripts/build.sh Default
This should produce the following outputs:
out/Default/headless_shell: browser binaryout/Default/icudtl.datout/Default/libEGL.soout/Default/libGLESv2.soout/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
Carbonyl 是一个基于 Chromium 的浏览器,完全在终端里运行,让你不用离开命令行就能浏览现代网页。