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Last modified Tue Dec 22 00:23:43 CET 2009
As of July 2009 the lightweight web browser abaco is now distributed as part of the stock Plan 9 distribution. It is a web browser that started as a rewrite of webpage, with many new improvements including tables support. A testing snapshot can be found at: /n/sources/contrib/fgb
Charon is the web browser supplied with the Inferno OS. It supports Javascript and https. It has very few features (a good thing) but requires the inferno runtime environment. Charon is packaged as part of Inferno
webfs(4) and html(2) were written at Bell labs as the backend for a new web browser; unfortunately the project stalled. Aki Nyrhinen has since written a simple frontend called webpage for these which does an amazingly good job of rendering basic web pages; it also makes interesting use of the plumber to support hyperlinks. This work also stalled and has been superseded by abaco.
Links is a graphical web browser which renders pages fairly well. It is not quite stable, crashing on some pages but usable for google searches and the like. It supports CSS and javascript but not java or https (though this would not take a great deal to fix). The current implementation is fairly graphics hungry and should be run on a local terminal for best peformance. The greatest annoyance with links is the lack of support for cut and paste between links windows and the plan9 snarf buffer. The source is availabe in Andrey Mirtchov's contrib dir: /n/sources/contrib/andrey/links.tgz
Mothra was written by Tom Duff for the second edition of plan9. It is very basic and does not support ftp, java, javascript, https or CSS. On the other hand it is very fast and compiles natively for plan9. The sources relies on the second edition panel library which has also been released, see /n/sources/extra/mothra.
The plan9 tools hget(1) and htmlfmt(1) can be used to fetch and render simple web pages but are most useful for scripted fetches (e.g. ap(1))
The best way to get a fully supported web browser under plan9 is to use the vnc client to connect to a linux or Windows box. This performs very well if used over a fast network connection.
