The Personal Website of Jeremy Boles

Netsurf

An independent, lightweight web browser.

Netsurf is an actively developed, independent browser with good support for CSS 2.1—the era before flexbox and grid—along with some genuinely useful newer features, @media queries among them.

Notes on Supporting Netsurf

Netsurf does not support display: flex, and that needn’t be a problem. Float-based layouts—and table-based layouts, if it comes to that—work in ordinary browsers and in Netsurf both. Look at a web design from the early 2000s and see what kinds of layout are possible.

Netsurf ignores CSS inside a @supports block. If a layout can’t be done with floats alone, start with a base layout that Netsurf can render and then progressively enhance it for browsers that support the newer features.

Use @media queries with px values to adjust for smaller screens. Often that means dropping a float when the screen is too narrow, so items stack instead of sitting side by side.

Netsurf only supports generic font families and will not display a custom font, even one installed on the machine running it. Which is a good exercise: learning to lean on design fundamentals like contrast and spacing is a sound place to start a design anyway, rather than on whatever is currently fashionable in typography. The families it supports:

  • sans-serif
  • serif
  • monospace
  • cursive
  • fantasy
  • default