I felt I needed a smaller faster browser for my Ubuntu virtual machine. So on the advice of doctor Google I found this page which mentioned seven.
I had a look at Otter and Netsurf. Is Ubuntu losing mind share? I tried several ways to install Otter and they all failed. They claim there’s a ppa repo, but apt failed to download with fatal errors claiming the repo was corrupted. Maybe it’s because they have abandoned .deb packages.
June 2025
I had another look, my target was Debian/Raspian. I found these,
- The netsurf browser home page & its Downloads page which points at, for Gnome linux builds,
- https://www.netsurf-browser.org/downloads/gtk/ which points at flatpak or source code compilation, or the Debian page. My raspian machines won’t install netsurf with apt, but will install netsurf_common which does not come with the program.
- With respect to flatpak, I found its home, and a how to install on Debian.
Let’s see if netsurf will install on vanilla debian. Not via apt. It works with flatpak, the runes are on the web, how to install flatpak, how to install netsurf & run it, and here , in an unfinished script by me, but no javascript, and so no google. Not much it seems, I tried it with javascript on and it doesn’t seem to work and tried a couple of sites, inc. diigo which also hung.
Feb 2024
I had a look at installing from source, but got stuck at Qt5. Shame, great logo and name.
I have successfully compiled Netsurf although some of the image handling functionality might be a bit underwhelming i.e. I might be missing some image handling software. It’s fast which is good, but it’s functionality is a problem for me. Maybe I should read the documentation but the big problem is that I have compiled from source and thus my regular apt job will not update it.
The purpose of this post is to document the missing software that will permit an error free compilation of Netsurf and the apt calls that will pull them down.
It needed a bunch of pre-reqs that no longer or do not come as standard with ubuntu 22, which surprises me, but I compiled from source. I have documented the missing programs and libraries in a script, on github. (There must be a better way of finding the apt runes.)
The required packages are,
sudo apt install flex bison gperf
sudo apt install expat expat1-dev libexpat1-dev
sudo apt install libcurl4-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev
sudo apt install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt install libcanberra-gtk-module
I am looking for lightweight because I am running Ubuntu in Virtual Box and I may be short of memory; ayway my preferred browser, Firefox, is slow and hangs. I may report on my usage another day.
I have copied the package list to this article, you don’t need to go the script to read them.
Blazingly fast but in flatpak, can’t get javascript to work, so pretty useless. It might have been a good decision two years ago, but not today.