Netsurf hasn't seen any love lately. It's still being developed on git but no releases. Same with Dillo.

Dillo rejects scripting. Makes perfect sense to me. It also rejects automatic redirects, which also makes sense but the web has already been established around that as given so it can't pass the most passive anti-bot.

The state of scripting support on Netsurf is uhm, quite interesting. Scripts can write to the page parse time (like a snowflake generator) but can't do ANYTHING after the page loaded, EXCEPT text fields and text areas. And scripts can always read but not write checkbox state. There aren't any button events, either, but if you check the state of a text field repeatedly you can do interactivity. What is also interesting is that the new way of finding elements (getElementById) is functional, but the old way (document.formName.elementName) ISN'T. So that means that basically nothing existing functions (apart from again, the snowflake generators from geocities). But you can do the old style text animations if you specifically program it to use the new method despite being old style shit. Netsurf also passes "GoAway" and the most basic setting of Anubis (the passive redirects).

Both are good enough to browse "old Lemmy", although I haven't tried to login since my instance doesn't have it and the owner ghosted me (hi @milan@discuss.tchncs.de).

There's also a half public domain half permissive (BSD) text mode browser, https://chawan.net/ . Extraordinarily good concept! However, it avoids some of the bloat by forcing bloat onto your terminal emulator and having it render images, and my terminal emulator does not bother itself with such tasks and emulates a terminal, so image heavy sites like Lemmy fucking suck on it. No, it cannot just weight different characters from some public domain font (spoiler: if converted, all of them by international conventions are public domain) by brightness and by individual pixel similarity to an actual image and then just display those. That would make too much sense. I have high hopes for it, though. Also, I find the keybinds really weird.

I have not tested Chawan's scripting support much at all, all I can say is that it's certainly better than Netsurf. And that everything I've written in the worst fucking programming language ever for Netsurf (not released yet, very soon I hope) runs on Chawan. However, they are unusable since textboxes open your preferred editor. Makes perfect sense, a browser shouldn't be a text editor. But like, that breaks my gimmick that makes it work with Netsurf, damn. Checkboxes can be written to, for once, tho no access key support. The JS is still not enough to login to Lemmy (the default bloated frontend).

Let's use Gemini.

Ah ty. I wasn't keeping track of either project, but good to know servo's the one to look out for instead.