Rosenrot

Rosenrot is a small browser forked from an earlier version of rose. It has some additional quality of life improvements tailored to my (@NunoSempere) tastes and setup, and detailed installation instructions for Ubuntu 20.04.

Installation

You can see detailed instructions here, for Ubuntu 20.04 in particular—though they should generalize easily to other distributions. Or a video installing rosenrot in a fresh Ubuntu 20.04 virtual machine here.

The general steps are to install dependencies, and then

make build
make install # or sudo make install

Usage

After building:

./rose

After installing:

rose

You can also create a rose.desktop file so that it will show up in your desktop environment. You can see this documented here.

Features

• Tabs, cookies, caching
• Minimal ui, autohiding elements
• ~464L core code (the rose.c file)
• Customize appearance of the browser through css
• Built-in rose-mklink script for in-shell static links
• Optional adblocking through wyebadblock
• Max number of tabs (by default 8), configurable.
• Plugin system, seeded with:
  • Libre redirect: Redirect annoying websites to open source frontends
  • Readability: Strip webpages of unnecessary elements for ease of reading with a custom shortcut
  • Custom style: Override the css of predetermined websites
  • Stand in plugin: Mimick function definitions which do nothing for the above plugins so that they can be quickly removed

You can see some screenshots in the screenshots folder.

Relationship with rose

• Rose is a minimal browser based on webkit2gtk. Previously, it described itself as aiming to be a "basement for creating your own browser using [the] gtk and webkit libraries".
• Rosenrot is my (@NunoSempere's) fork from rose. It has accumulated quality of life features/cruft that I like, like a "readability" plugin that simplifies annoying websites like Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter. It also incorporates ad-blocking.
• Rosenrot is also a song by the German hardcore rock band Rammstein.

Contribute

• Contribute upstream to github.com/mini-rose/rose for core functionality changes.
• Contribute here for quality of life improvements, by sending a pull request on Github.

Cool things

I just found out that you can inspect a GTK application with the GTK explorer if you set a certain command-line variable. Try this with make inspect.

Known bugs/gotchas.

• Doesn't work with when Spanish is selected as the language, for some reason.
• At some point, I tried to install libsoup-3 and borked some unknown installation option/paths. So now I need to run rose with GIO_MODULE_DIR=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gio/modules/ /bin/rose (or put export GIO_MODULE_DIR=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gio/modules/ in my .bashrc). This won't affect new users though, just double checked on a fresh machine.
• By default the searchbar is pretty gigantic. I've made this so because I'm a bit myopic, but also work with my laptop in a laptop stand. Anyways, if you are a more normal person you can change this in the style.css.
• The style.css usage isn't updated until installation. This is because by default rose uses the theme located in /usr/share/themes/rose/style.css, and that file isn't updated until make install.

To do

Quality of life:

• Add css for js alerts
  • Add custom alert whose css can be customized
  • Debug problems, e.g., this version is non-blocking.
• Figure out better way to have plugins
• Double check newtab/next-tab behavior
• Document creating new applications, e.g., as in Asana for Linux
• Add list of similar projects: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser#similar-projects

Maintenance

• Set webkit_web_context_set_sandbox_enabled, as recommended here
• Use something other than Whatsapp as an example syslink.
• Fix bug about distorted audio. Maybe related to this pipewire issue?
• Upgrade to GTK-4 / Webkitgtk 6.0? Will take a fair amount of time, since these are not available on Ubuntu 20.04.

Previously done

• Add a shortcut for hiding the search tab. => Already exists: Ctrl+K
• Find out what each of the css elements refers to. => done, see make inspect
• Figure out if downloading files is doable. => it is
• Look at using relative rather than absolute paths for configuration. => now makefile is a bit smarter
• Streamline installation a bit
  • Substitute paths in makefile
  • Create cache directory automatically
• Add an installation video walkthrough. Done, here
• Document stand_in.c better
• Use a makefile.
  • Add clean, uninstall to makefile
• Mask user agent
• Launch with more than one tab from command line
• Figure out merge with upstream
• String substitution on uri in order to redirect to better frontends.
• Present "standard" browser keybindings as an alternative.
• Fix zoom in new tab
• Reader mode
• Add reader mode to config.def.
• Make tab bar slightly prettier.
• Add "open in new window" functionality.
  • Useful for opening links in new tab when clicking on them and selecting that option
  • And for actually opening links with the href new_tab option.
  • Links: 1, 2, 3, 4