Goosie

Goosie is an experimental web browser engine written in Go. It implements its own HTML/CSS pipeline, layout engine, display list, and rasterizer—without WKWebView, WebView2, CEF, or another embedded browser.

Fyne provides the desktop window and input handling; page rendering is done by Goosie.

Goosie is under active development and supports a subset of the web platform. See Supported Web Platform for current coverage.

• Asynchronous HTTP navigation with cancellation and resource limits
• Custom DOM, CSS selector, style, and layout engines
• Block, inline, flex, grid, form, and table layout
• Pure Go CPU rasterization with retained display lists and dirty-region updates
• JavaScript through Goja, with custom DOM and browser API bindings
• Tabs, history, bookmarks, profiles, local storage, cookies, and cache
• Built-in console, DOM inspector, network log, and storage tools
• GUI and headless PNG rendering

All of the following pages are rendered entirely by Goosie's own layout engine and CPU rasterizer—no embedded browser is involved.

Long-form article with nested sections	CSS Grid layout
CSS selectors, cascade, and styling	HTML table layout

Goosie requires Go 1.24.9 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/vyquocvu/goosie.git
cd goosie
go mod download
go run ./cmd/browser

To open a page at startup:

go run ./cmd/browser -url=https://example.com

On Linux, install the native libraries required by Fyne first:

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dev xorg-dev

Build a binary with:

make build
./bin/goosie

For a smaller release binary, use the size-optimized target. It keeps the existing symbol/debug stripping, removes local path metadata with -trimpath, and clears the Go build ID for reproducible, slightly smaller output:

make build-small
./bin/goosie-small

If you need the smallest distributable file and accept the trade-offs of packed executables (slightly slower startup and occasional antivirus false positives), install UPX and run:

make build-small-upx

Capture a website with the headless-tag browser build:

go run -tags headless ./cmd/browser -headless \
  -url=https://example.com \
  -screenshot=screenshot.png
# or build it first
make build-headless
./bin/goosie-headless -headless -url=https://example.com -screenshot=screenshot.png

The default GUI build intentionally leaves out Fyne's test driver to keep the binary smaller; use the headless-tag build above for URL screenshots.

Render local HTML or standard input directly to PNG:

go run ./cmd/headless -html=page.html -output=page.png
# or
echo '<h1>Hello, Goosie</h1>' | go run ./cmd/headless -output=page.png

Use -width and -height to change the headless viewport.

HTTP/HTML
  → DOM parser
  → CSS cascade and computed styles
  → layout and fragments
  → display list
  → CPU rasterizer
  → Fyne window or PNG

Core code lives under internal/; runnable programs live under cmd/.

go test ./... -short                         # quick suite
go test ./...                                # full local suite
go test -tags=e2e ./test/e2e                 # end-to-end tests
go test ./internal/renderer/layoutgolden/    # layout snapshots

The end-to-end suite requires Playwright and network access. Install Playwright with make install-playwright.

• Architecture
• Supported Web Platform
• Documentation Site
• Testing
• Performance
• Roadmap
• MCP Integration Roadmap
• Contributing

MIT