Raspberry Pi Gets An HTML5-Capable Web Browser

The adorably awesome $35 Raspberry Pi has proven to be a fun, flexible, and relatively powerful tool for hackers, tinkerers, and makers, but the platform has been lacking a modern web browser.

That’s changing, as the Raspberry Pi team, in collaboration with Collabora, have developed an “up-to-date”, HTML5-capable web browser. The idea is that it’s a port of Web (the web browser formerly known as Epiphany), and it will offer multi-tab features, ARMv6-optimized 2D rendering, and accelerated image and HTML5 video decoding.

Raspberry Pi web browser

Collectively, the teams have already finished the porting process and are hard at work on the memory footprint optimizations, which will enable the use of a proper number of simultaneous tabs.

The browser is in “early” beta, so bear that in mind if you decide to play with it. Also, note that apparently installing the beta has been breaking other parts of the system, so the Raspberry Pi folks advise backing up your SD card first.