Nessie

Nessie is an extremely simple web browser for Windows, best used as a secondary browser. It was inspired by other minimal web browsers such as Netsurf or Dillo, but aims for better compatibility with the modern web, and higher security.

In a world dominated by Chromium and its derivatives, Nessie is one of the few remaining browsers based on the Trident layout engine. (You might have a strong urge to stop reading right here - don't!)

Its feature set is intentionally limited to the bare essentials, to minimize both distractions and attack vectors. It is a good option if you are looking for a fast, casual and low-resource browser, or need to use legacy websites requiring an IE-compatible web browser.

Note that Nessie has no extensions, no tabs, and no toolbars. On the surface, it could be described as just a "webview with an address bar". Read below to find out how it is much more than that.



Why Trident?

Using Trident in 2020, for all its flaws, provides a few real benefits:

● A frozen feature set means fewer bugs over time
● A mature codebase and a battle-tested engine
● Built into every version of Windows
● Monthly security updates are still provided by Microsoft
● Excellent HTML5/JavaScript support (compared to other sub-1MB browsers)

Features

● Large viewable screen space
● Privacy-oriented: zero behavior tracking, zero telemetry
● Very lightweight adblocker
● Lightning-fast startup time
● Tiny binary size
● Low RAM usage
● KeePass friendly


Security

Did you know? 4 out of the last 5 zero-day exploits in Trident were due to critical bugs in the legacy jscript.dll engine, which has been deprecated for a long time, but any web page can still force IE11 to load it. Nessie takes specific measures to entirely block out the loading of that DLL, which greatly minimizes its attack surface.

Nessie also has some other unique security features including TLD whitelisting, URL scheme whitelisting, MITM detection, URL homoglyph detection and strict patch-level checking. More details on these soon!

The PureBasic source code for the core (150-lines of code) version is also available.




Download (64-bit binary)
Download (source, core version)


Getting started

No installation needed! Just unzip to any folder, and launch.
Options can be customized by editing config files.


Requirements

Windows 7 or later, with the latest security updates.
Admin rights are not required.


Beta

This is an experimental browser still in beta, with many features still incomplete. Expect bugs and rough edges. Some websites might not display properly.


Privacy

Nessie fully respects your privacy and contains no adware, malware or sponsored content of any sort. It also does not send data to any third party.

This website does not collect any personal information.




FAQ (Coming soon)