When it seems that modern browsers have exhausted their capacity to surprise, someone comes along and returns the internet to the terminal. Not in the spartan, text-only style of the Lynx era, but with full-fledged graphics and contemporary websites that genuinely resemble an “ordinary” browser. The project is called brow6el, and it runs entirely within a terminal window—provided your terminal emulator supports Sixel graphics.
The developer, known by the handle janantos, published brow6el on Codeberg during the New Year holidays. The key lies in Sixel, a method for rendering raster images directly in the terminal via control sequences—essentially using “tiles” of characters, each encoding a narrow column of pixels. Accumulate enough of these columns and you obtain full-color images, and, if desired, even animation. In brow6el, this graphical output is handled by the libsixel library.
What is most striking is that this is not a simplified rendering mode or a clever reader view. Pages are rendered in full, because the project embeds the Chromium Embedded Framework under the hood. The repository includes a demonstration video showing that the browser truly draws familiar websites inside a terminal window. Functionally, it is far from a toy: it supports mouse input, bookmarks, a download manager, standard and private browsing modes, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript via Chromium, a page inspector, a JavaScript console, pop-up handling, and even a built-in ad blocker.
The display is continuously refreshed to keep pages up to date, and multiple instances can be launched, freeing users from the confines of a single terminal window. For those who wish to “live entirely in the terminal,” the author has added Vim-style navigation with single-key commands. There is even mouse emulation, allowing the cursor to be moved with the H, J, K, and L keys, without ever touching a physical pointing device.
Against the backdrop of today’s race toward ever more “intelligent” features, this approach feels almost like an act of protest. Over the past year, major browsers have been rushing to embed AI capabilities, while several companies have launched explicitly “AI-first” browsers—moves that inevitably raise concerns about privacy and security. The project’s description even references a warning from Gartner, which advised organizations to block browsers that include AI sidebars in order to reduce the risk of confidential information being inadvertently siphoned into machine learning models.
That said, brow6el does not pretend to be a polished, mass-market product. The author is explicit that it remains a proof of concept, with stability dependent on the specific system and environment, and with certain features behaving imperfectly. Issues are noted, for example, with localized keyboard layouts and the input of diacritical characters. Yet the underlying idea is simple: if you are weary of bloated modern browsers and unwilling to accept the possibility that your data may eventually be swept into someone else’s AI pipeline, it may be easier to tolerate a few rough edges—and even contribute to the project—than to submit to a trend that seems to be heading in entirely the wrong direction.