cwbrowser

What it does

cwbrowser is a desktop web browser built on a rendering engine written from scratch in Zig. Instead of relying on the three mainstream engine families (Chromium/Blink, WebKit, Gecko), it ships its own engine: the HTML tokenizer and parser, DOM construction, CSS parsing and cascade, layout, and paint pipeline are all original Zig code. The goal described on the page is an engine that is small enough to reason about end-to-end while still behaving like a real, standards-following browser.

For JavaScript, cwbrowser does not attempt to reimplement a modern JIT VM. It embeds Google’s V8 (the same JavaScript engine used in Chrome and Node) and binds it to the from-scratch DOM, so scripts can interact with the page through the browser’s own document model.

The project highlights standards and performance evidence from the site. cwbrowser reports a perfect 100/100 score on the Acid3 conformance test, and the page includes example load/render timings such as a fully loaded Acid3 page in 2265 ms and rendering the news.ycombinator.com homepage in 599 ms (both rendered by cwbrowser’s own engine). The site also states early benchmarking results of roughly 2× faster than Google Chrome on the same hardware.

A public preview build is described as “coming soon” for macOS on Apple Silicon. The download is not yet posted; interested users are instructed to email the author to be notified when the beta is available. The page also notes the site is built without analytics.

Intended users, based on the content, include developers and engineers interested in browser engine construction, standards conformance (Acid3), and experimenting with a lightweight from-scratch rendering engine implemented in Zig with V8 for JavaScript execution.

Workflow (as presented): follow the project, review the conformance/performance information provided, and request access to the upcoming macOS Apple Silicon preview build via email when it becomes available.

Key components called out on the page include: Zig implementation with manual memory management (no garbage collector), a from-scratch HTML tokenizer and tree builder producing a live DOM shared with V8, an original CSS parser and cascade (selectors, specificity, inheritance, box model), hand-written block/inline layout and painting that matches Acid3 output, and V8 embedded and wired to the DOM for JavaScript support.

S

Ship Stacks

Stop wiring boilerplate. Start shipping product.

▲ 5P

Peptides API

The intelligence layer for peptide research.

▲ 2C

cheapstack

Ship faster with affordable developer starter kits

▲ 1