Of course I can always use a browser but it's overkill.
No, it's exactly what you want.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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Do you just want to see the text content of a HTML file? - a text editor
Do you want most, if not all, HTML tags to be rendered as pretty graphical shapes?
Do you want the text have proper fonts?
Styles? You need something to parse CSS files.
What about dynamically generated content like ten smiley faces? You need a JavaScript engine.
Do you also want to see iframes? You need it to be capable of sending XHR requests.
What if it references to a piece of WebAssembly?
It's way more complicated than you anticipated.
Maybe an e-book reader like KOReader? https://flathub.org/apps/rocks.koreader.KOReader
Plenty of them support local HTML.
probably most of them do. epubs are mostly html after all.
You can also use a light browser such as Qutebrowser.
Believe it or not. kde's khelpcenter is what I have been using. Not sure if it includes images, but it renders simple html files and according to the Arch package. It is only like 7 MiB. Way better and faster than using a whole browser, but doesn't really support javascript obviously.
Thanks! Unfortunately my system is not KDE so it would pull in too much.
yelp (help for gnome) can render HTML, too.
I've been trying different things; in the end I guess something like yad or zenity is still the best. netsurf is really fast but I don't know how to style it as a viewer without a toolbar/urlbar.
I'd love to find a simple frontend to litehtml.
weasyprint will convert it to PDF. I use it in a script to make my emails readable offline.
Dillo? Or terminal? Then lynx or links2.
Netsurf uses GTK, it's own html 5, css 2 engine and the install size is 6mb not including gtk.
FWIW "just displaying html" is one of those can of worms type problems that looks easy enough to start making but actually impossible to do fully correct.
You want something thats doing a WebView, so if not a Firefox then maybe one of the lighter weight ones like Falkon or Gnome Web etc.
A more lightweight browser?
You gotta understand, browsers are designed to be HTML parsers. You can write an HTML file and double click to open in browser so your only option is a web browser.
Some browsers are certainly light weght than others, find the one that suits your need and use it
Notepad++ in WINE