Old-time web users will fondly remember Lynx, a text-only browser that ran from the terminal. Now, there’s a Sixel-compatible web browser that runs completely from the terminal, and has all the graphics and modern features you’d expect.

Published on Codeberg over the holiday break by a developer going by janantos, brow6el runs entirely within terminal emulators that support the Sixel graphics format.

For those unfamiliar with Sixel, it’s a bitmap graphics format designed for terminals and printers that encodes bitmap data into terminal escape sequences, with each printable character representing a 6-pixel-high, 1-pixel-wide column. Tile enough of them together and you’ve got full-color images, and even animation. In brow6el’s case, it uses the libsixel package to generate graphics.

This minimalist in-terminal browser isn’t just able to display fully rendered web pages thanks to the Chromium Embedded Framework, as demonstrated in a video included in the Codeberg repository. It also supports full mouse input, bookmarks, a download manager, private and normal browsing modes, HTML5/CSS/JavaScript support via Chromium, a page inspection mode, JavaScript console, popup handling, a pre-installed ad blocker - basically the works, all running inside a terminal with graphics good enough that it looks like your typical corporate, AI-ified browser.

Graphics are regularly re-rendered to keep the page up to date, and it also supports multiple instances, so no need to constrain yourself to a single terminal window while browsing the web. For those who want to go full terminal, brow6el also includes "Vim-like navigation with single key commands," according to its developer. There’s even mouse emulation that lets users move a cursor around the screen using the H, J, K, and L keys instead of using an actual pointing device.

A port in the AI browser storm

The addition of unwanted AI features to web browsers has become as inevitable as the rising of the sun over the past year, with Google, Microsoft, and even Firefox falling over themselves to stick as much automation into their browsers as users will let them get away with.

• Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful
• Arc put on ice as The Browser Company bets big on AI-powered Dia
• HashJack attack shows AI browsers can be fooled with a simple ‘#’
• Google stuffs Chrome full of AI features whether you like it or not

In other cases, companies like OpenAI and Perplexity have even launched their own AI-first browsers that, predictably, have been cybersecurity and privacy nightmares.

AI-powered web browsers are such a serious risk that Gartner warned organizations to block any and all web browsers with so much as an AI sidebar in them for fear that the companies running the models powering them would "accidentally" slurp up confidential information.

As full-featured as it is, brow6el might not be an end-all, be-all alternative to less secure and AI-bloated browsers, however.

"This is POC code quality," its developer warned, suggesting your mileage may vary if you try to run it on your own Linux-based system.

"It is known it doesn’t work with localized keyboards, it lacks support for accented characters for input," its maker noted as one such limitation.

Still, in an era when you can’t trust your browser not to hand over corporate or sensitive personal data to an LLM to be ingested for training purposes, dealing with a few code errors might be worth it if you have the skill to address them and contribute to the project. ®