Forking Chrome to render in a terminal (2023)

Wow, that's crazy. I also had never heard of Mojo before. Reminds me of Microsoft COM.

Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34547259

This is really, really cool!

Skia is a incredible abstraction layer. The linked article at the top of the OP https://fathy.fr/html2svg (2022) has some great graphics of how Skia can support various backends including PDF rendering (via https://skia.org/docs/user/sample/pdf/).

It's also worth noting that the Chrome Graphics team is writing yet another Skia rasterization backend, just announced last month: https://blog.chromium.org/2025/07/introducing-skia-graphite-...

Given that this article came out a couple years ago, it's quite possible that it was seen by the Chrome team and inspired them to look at making a new backend from scratch!

Fun fact, this project helped the author get a job: https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl/issues/162#issuecomment-1...

Carbonyl is surprisingly performant and usable, especially with --zoom=300 --bitmap

At lower resolutions, it would be nice to render images using a "subpixel" terminal rendering library like chafa (https://hpjansson.org/chafa/), or maybe sixels/kitty image protocol.

This needs an option to use the Kitty Graphics Protocol: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/

No need to render to ASCII/Unicode anymore!

It's surprisingly capable. One tricky problem is trying to solve Captchas with it.