Rosenrot

A small browser forked from rose.

• Rose is a minimal browser based on webkit2gtk which aims to be a "basement for creating your own browser using [the] gtk and webkit libraries".
• Rosenrot is my fork from rose. It has accumulated cruft that I like, like a "readability" plugin that simplifies annoying websites like Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter.
• Rosenrot is also a song by the German hardcore rock band Rammstein.

You can see some screenshots in the screenshots folder.

Features

• tabs, cookies, caching
• minimal ui, autohiding elements
• ~467L core code (the rose.c file)
• custom gtk and websites css
• builtin rose-mklink script for in-shell static links
• A few quality of life improvements.
  • Optional adblocking through wyebadblock
  • Plugin system:
    • 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

Installation

Install dependencies, then:

make build
make install # or sudo make install

You can also see more detailed instructions here, for Ubuntu 20.04 in particular—though they should generalize trivially.

👐 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.

To do

• Add an installation tutorial
• Look at using relative rather than absolute paths
• Add css for js alerts
• Figure out if downloading files is doable.
• Figure out better way to have plugins
• Double check newtab/next-tab behavior
• Find out what each of the css elements refers to.
• Use something other than Whatsapp as an example syslink.
• Set webkit_web_context_set_sandbox_enabled (https://webkitgtk.org/reference/webkit2gtk/2.36.8/WebKitWebContext.html#webkit-web-context-set-sandbox-enabled), as recommended here: https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2022/11/04/stop-using-qtwebkit/.
• Fix bug about distorted audio. Maybe related to https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/1547

Done:

• 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: https://docs.gtk.org/gobject/func.signal_connect.html, https://webkitgtk.org/reference/webkit2gtk/2.37.90/signal.AutomationSession.create-web-view.html, https://webkitgtk.org/reference/webkit2gtk/2.26.0/WebKitWebView.html#WebKitWebView-create https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40180757/webkit2gtk-get-new-window-link

Known bugs

• Doesn't work with when Spanish is selected as the language, for some reason.