The Epiphany web browser is included with Poky. Epiphany started as a fork of the Mozilla Suite intended to make a lean, fast browser. Epiphany started off as Galeon and it needed a second fork to become the current Epiphany project. It moved away from Mozilla's Gecko layout engine in favor of using Webkit, a layout engine with origins in the KDE project. It is the default browser for the GNOME project and it complies with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. It is released under the GPLv3 license. To include Epiphany, we only need to add it to our image by modifying conf/local.conf, as follows:

IMAGE_INSTALL_append = " epiphany" 

The Epiphany browser can make use of graphical acceleration if run under a hardware-accelerated X11 or Wayland back-end, but it does not currently make use of the video acceleration features on the i.MX6 CPU.

The Firefox web browser also originated from the Mozilla Suite. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Foundation under a MPL-2.0 license. To include the Firefox web browser, we need to add the meta-browser layer to our Yocto installation as follows:

$ cd /opt/yocto/fsl-community-bsp/sources
$ git clone https://github.com/OSSystems/meta-browser.git
$ cd /opt/yocto/fsl-community-bsp/
$ source setup-environment wandboard
$ bitbake-layers add-layer /opt/yocto/fsl-community-bsp/sources/meta-browser

We can then add the firefox package to our image using the next line in our conf/local.conf file:

IMAGE_INSTALL_append = " firefox" 

The Firefox browser can make use of graphical acceleration if run under a hardware-accelerated X11 or Wayland back-end, but it does not currently make use of the video acceleration features on the i.MX6 CPU.

Chromium is an open source browser started by Google and maintained by the Chromium project. It has a mixture of open source licenses that include BSD, MIT, LGPL, and MPL. It is also available on the meta-browser layer installed previously. It has a dependency on the meta-gnome layer, which in turn depends on meta-networking and meta-python, so we also have to add them to our conf/bblayers.conf with:

$ bitbake-layers add-layer /opt/yocto/fsl-community-bsp/sources/meta-openembedded/meta-python
$ bitbake-layers add-layer /opt/yocto/fsl-community-bsp/sources/meta-openembedded/meta-networking
$ bitbake-layers add-layer /opt/yocto/fsl-community-bsp/sources/meta-openembedded/meta-gnome

We can add the chromium package to our image using the next line in our conf/local.conf file:

IMAGE_INSTALL_append = " chromium" 

Chromium can use the graphical acceleration on the i.MX6 CPU if it runs over a hardware-accelerated X11 or Wayland backend. It can also run over the framebuffer using the EGLFS Qt5 platform plugin.