(yes, it's a browser built from scratch in rust)

a minimal web browser that renders html, parses css, executes javascript.

it's a custom web browser written entirely in rust. no webkit, no chromium, no gecko. just pure rust rendering HTML to pixels on your screen. it tokenizes HTML, builds a DOM tree, computes styles with CSS specificity, performs layout calculations, and paints everything to a framebuffer.

• html parsing: custom tokenizer and DOM tree builder with proper tag nesting.
• css styling: supports selectors, specificity, colors, font sizes, padding, and more.
• javascript execution: runs scripts via the boa engine (console.log, document.write, etc).
• clickable links: navigate between pages by clicking ;a> tags.
• scrolling: smooth mouse wheel scrolling through long pages.
• self-closing tags: properly handles g/>,
r/>, and other void elements.
• url bar: type any url and hit enter to navigate.

i wanted to understand how browsers actually work under the hood. parsing, rendering, layout—all of it. also, most "build a browser" tutorials stop at toy examples that can't load real websites.

so, i made this :D

# clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/aryan-madan/Photon-Browser

cd photon-browser


# build release version
cargo build --release



# run it
./target/release/photon_browserr

or you can download the .exe from releases tab

1. fetch → downloads html via http
2. tokenize → breaks html into tags and text
3. parse → builds a tree of nodes (the dom)
4. style → applies css rules with proper specificity
5. layout → calculates position and size of boxes
6. paint → rasterizes text and backgrounds to pixels
7. display → presents the framebuffer to the window

• large pages can be slow (no gpu acceleration)
• some websites with complex css won't render correctly
• javascript dom manipulation is limited
• no https certificate validation

pull requests welcome! this is a learning project, so don't expect production-quality code. but if you want to add features or fix bugs, go for it.

• inspired by linus lee's Browser.engineering
• css parsing based on mozilla's servo research
• javascript via boa engine

MIT - do whatever you want with it

enjoy (._.)/