Small as a mouse, fast as a cheetah and available for free. NetSurf is a web browser for RISC OS and UNIX-like platforms including Linux.
Whether you want to check your webmail, read the news or post to discussion forums, NetSurf is your lightweight gateway to the world wide web. Actively developed, NetSurf is continually evolving and improving.
Written in C, this award winning open source project features its own layout engine. It is licensed under GPL version 2.
Why choose NetSurf?
- Speed
- Efficiency lies at the heart of the NetSurf engine, allowing it to outwit the heavyweights of the web browser world. The NetSurf team continue to squeeze more speed out of their code.
- Interface innovation
- Simple to use and easy to grasp, NetSurf significantly raised the bar for user interface design on the RISC OS platform. Designed carefully by RISC OS users and developers to integrate well with the desktop, NetSurf is seen as the benchmark for future applications. NetSurf pioneered the concept of web page thumbnailing, offering an intuitive graphical tree-like view of visited web sites.
- Lean requirements
- From a modern monster PC to a humble 30MHz ARM 6 computer with 16MB of RAM, the web browser will keep you surfing the web whatever your system. Originally written for computer hardware normally found in PDAs, cable TV boxes, mobile phones and other hand-held gadgets, NetSurf is compact and low maintenance by design.
- Portable
- NetSurf can be built for a number of modern computer platforms 'out of the box'. Written in C, with portability in mind, NetSurf is developed by programmers from a wide range of computing backgrounds, ensuring it remains available for as many users as possible.
- Standards compliant
- Despite a myriad of standards to support, NetSurf makes surfing the web enjoyable and stress-free by striving for complete standards compliancy. As an actively developed project, NetSurf aims to stay abreast of new and upcoming web technologies.
See the project goals and progress page for further information on where NetSurf is headed.
Latest news
- Summary of recent developments 09 Nov 2008
- New framebuffer port, better CSS support, improved page layout, tabbed browsing improvements, new features and functionality for BeOS and AmigaOS ports.
- AmigaOS and BeOS ports 18 Aug 2008
- New native port to AmigaOS and work on the BeOS port continues. Both ports are at an early stage, but usable.
- Summary of recent developments 17 Aug 2008
- Bumper development summary, including performance and page layout improvements, better text selection handling, vastly improved GTK front end, ports to new platforms and Google Summer of Code round-up.
NetSurf 1.2 features
- General
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- Web standards: HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1
- Image formats: PNG, GIF, JPEG, JNG, MNG and BMP
- HTTPS for secure online transactions
- Unicode text
- Web page thumbnailing
- Local history trees
- URL completion
- Scale view
- RISC OS only
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- Image formats: Sprite, Drawfile and ArtWorks
- Global history
- Hotlist management (bookmarks)
- Cookie viewer
- Drawfile export
- Text selection
- Search-as-you-type text search highlighting
Awards
NetSurf beat off stiff competition to win the 2007 award for "best non-commercial software" at Drobe Launch Pad's annual event. NetSurf was nominated for the award by Drobe's readers.
NetSurf won the Best of 2006 award at Drobe Launch Pad for "best non-commercial software" and the NetSurf development team came runner up in the category for "best overall contribution".