Show HN: Tilefinch – a from-scratch* web browser for the PSP (333Mhz, 64MB RAM)

I picked up my PSP for the first time in about a decade and wanted to find out three things: how far the hardware could be pushed, how much of the modern web fits on it, and what today’s coding agents can do. A web browser tests all three.

Tilefinch runs entirely on a PSP-3000: networking, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, layout and rendering, over Wi-Fi, with no proxy or companion computer. The style, layout, paint, media and UI layers are new C code and a patched QuickJS runs the JavaScript.

Each page gets a single 32 MB budget covering DOM, JavaScript, CSS, images, layout and tiles.

A few things that work: logged-out ChatGPT rendering a response; YouTube and HTML video through the PSP’s hardware decoder, at up to 360p; Canvas 2D and WebGL 1 on the PSP’s graphics chip (the repo includes a new 3D tank game as a demo). There's also modern browser features like Reader mode, dark mode, an ad blocker, language packs and in-app updates.

However, some sites are too large (in which the browser offers a "Basic" mode) and most are slow to render.

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50046459

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