MOB³ is a compact, self-contained browser for the terminal

Written in Go, it combines its own HTML parser, CSS cascade and layout engine, ANSI renderer and pure-Go JavaScript runtime to display real web pages, including inline images, without a GUI toolkit or persistent profile. History, cookies, storage and caches live in memory only: closing MOB³ saves nothing.

Warning

MOB³ is not a secure browser in any way. It has no sandboxing, process isolation, site isolation, CSP enforcement, certificate UI or security hardening, and it has not been audited. Page JavaScript runs in a hobby-grade engine. Do not use MOB³ to log in to accounts, enter passwords, make payments, or handle confidential data. Use it at your own risk.

Try it with Docker:

docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/mob3net/mob3

With no URL, MOB³ opens about:home (the start page). Use -home to point it somewhere else.

Development

Build from source and start browsing:

make
./bin/mob3 https://example.com

Requires Go 1.27 or newer. Interactive mode runs on Linux and macOS terminals; Windows users can run it under WSL. When stdin/stdout are not a terminal, MOB³ automatically falls back to dump mode.

Press ? inside the app for keys, mouse and forms help. Run mob3 -h for the full list of command-line flags. mob3 -version prints the embedded version.

What to expect

MOB³ is a content browser, not a full browser engine. It is happiest with text-focused pages and gets rough on modern JavaScript-heavy apps.

Works well

• Documentation, blogs, news articles, wikis, forums, changelogs and old or server-rendered HTML.
• Headings, paragraphs, lists, links, tables, <pre> blocks, images and common presentational markup.
• Text/search inputs and textareas, with GET and urlencoded POST form submission.
• Common CSS: selectors, cascade and inheritance, box model, margins, borders, backgrounds, text styling, lists, tables, viewport-width @media queries and basic flex rows.
• PNG/JPEG/GIF/SVG/data-URI images, with kitty or iTerm2 inline graphics and a half-block art fallback.
• Light JavaScript: DOM queries and mutation, classList/style, click handlers, timers, dialogs, same-origin fetch/XMLHttpRequest, and in-memory storage/cookies. Script errors show a short JS: Error footer hint; ! opens the full console, where the > row runs JavaScript expressions.
• Browser-style toolbar with back/forward/reload/home, bookmarks/history/help buttons, a config gear and a centered page title.
• Keyboard and mouse navigation, a draggable page scrollbar, history (including a top-right History page listing the session's links), bookmarks imported with -bookmarks from a Netscape HTML export, scrolling, focus, link hover targets in the footer, text selection, and a ! console with the current page's request log.

Rough edges

• Modern JavaScript apps (SPAs, dashboards, Google search and similar) may show a partial page, a blank page or their no-JavaScript fallback. Pages that rely on ES modules show a status-bar warning that modules are unsupported.
• Anti-bot and firewall checks (Cloudflare, CAPTCHA, DataDome/PerimeterX, Imperva/Sucuri, access-denied pages) are generally not usable. A “Site blocked” page is shown instead.
• No video/audio playback, WebGL, WebAssembly, workers, WebSockets, iframes, Shadow DOM, custom elements, real observers or full History API.
• Basic CSS grid rows are supported; floats, absolute positioning, CSS variables, animations, transitions, generated content, @import and background images are unsupported or approximated as block flow.
• SVG support is partial: text inside SVG, <use>/<symbol>, filters, masks and CSS-in-SVG may be missing. WebP is not supported.
• Oversized images are capped at 60% of the viewport width and 24 rows, preserving their aspect ratio.
• No tabs, downloads or multipart/file uploads. Selected page text copies with y through OSC 52 (terminal support required), and the URL can be selected with the terminal.
• Very large pages, stylesheets and images are capped to keep memory and CPU bounded. Style and layout also run under a time budget, so a pathological page is shown partially with a truncation notice instead of freezing the browser. Pages whose timers update the DOM are redrawn a few times per second rather than continuously.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Every pull request must include the broad license-grant CLA statement described in CONTRIBUTING.md; it keeps MOB³ available under both AGPL-3.0-only and a commercial license. The PR workflow checks the statement. The CI workflow runs formatting, vet and tests.

License

MOB³ is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 only (AGPL-3.0-only). Copyright (c) 2026 Milos Stojanovic. See LICENSE.

A separate commercial license is available on request for use without the AGPL's source-disclosure requirements.

MOB³ is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind. See the warning at the top: this is a hobby browser, not a security boundary.

Third-party module licenses are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.