Herdr Browser (Deprecated)

Warning

This project is no longer maintained. Use terminal-browser instead.

Herdr Browser was an experiment in making browser automation visible and interactive inside a Herdr pane. Its rendering path captures Chromium frames through the Chrome DevTools Protocol and sends encoded PNG images through Herdr's pane graphics stream:

Chromium → CDP screencast → PNG → pane.graphics.stream → Herdr → terminal

This requires Chromium to encode browser frames as PNGs and the display path to decode them again.

Terminal Browser uses Electron's offscreen rendering surfaces and Herdr's newer file-backed frame API:

Electron offscreen frame
  → IOSurface (macOS) or shared-memory buffer (Linux)
  → native compositor
  → raw RGBA frame file
  → pane.graphics.stream
  → Herdr → terminal

Instead of sending encoded image data for every frame, it writes raw RGBA frames to files in Herdr's frame directory and submits lightweight metadata such as:

{
  "format": "rgba",
  "file": { "path": "..." },
  "sequence": 42,
  "revision": 0
}

Herdr acknowledges each frame before its buffer can be reused. This avoids the PNG encode/decode cycle and gives Terminal Browser a faster foundation for a full browser experience.

Migrate

Install Terminal Browser on macOS or Linux:

curl -fsSL https://terminal-browser.sh/install | bash

See the Terminal Browser repository for current usage and documentation.