A new console web browser Carbonyl has been introduced, based on the Chromium engine and capable of displaying any sites in the terminal, including YouTube. The browser supports almost all Web APIs, including WebGL, WebGPU, and tools for playing video, sound, and animation. Operation is possible both with direct launch of the terminal and with connection via SSH. Tying around the Chromium engine is written in TypeScript, C ++ and Rust.
The project continues the development of the html2svg utility, which was originally developed to convert HTML and to vector (SVG, PDF) or raster images (PNG, JPEG, WebP), and is now used as the basis for rendering to the terminal. To display graphics, the capabilities of terminals such as xterm-256 are used to display unicode characters in color - the symbol U + 2584 ("▄") is used as a virtual pixel. Taking advantage of the fact that the aspect ratio in this symbol is 1:2, it is possible to display two square pixels based on it, the top of which sets the background color, and the bottom one sets the foreground.
The xterm escape sequences are used to track mouse movement, cursor movement, and text color changes. An xterm terminal can use a 6x6x6 RGB palette, and when set to COLORTERM mode, a 24-bit full-color RGB palette is possible. Text is rendered at a fixed size, separate from images. To intercept text in the Skia library, a separate handler is connected. The rendering code is optimized for running in the terminal and allows you to display graphics at a refresh rate of 60 FPS with minimal CPU load.
Source: opennet.ru
