2.4 KiB
Hacking on the Rose browser
I recently had the pleasure of tinkering with the rose browser for a few days. It's a Linux-based minimalist web browser, making it easy and fun to customize. To help others who may explore this project, I decided to leave some notes about my experience.
Rose is written in C and takes advantage of the WebKit and GTK libraries. WebKit, which drives Safari, is a fork of the open-source KHTML and KJS libraries. GTK, on the other hand, is a library for enabling graphical user interfaces. You can utilize both libraries simultaneously by using WebKitGTK.
Personally, I have found solace in the simplicity of this code. Nevertheless, for usability purposes and for my own enjoyment, I have been adding some code to it. You can have a look at my edits here.
I've made two main changes to the Rose Browser:
- I've implemented a reader mode
- I've added redirection functionality, which redirects users to open source frontends of otherwise annoying websites.
The reader mode allows readers to access a page in a more visually-appealing way; it returns a page that is easy and enjoyable to read.
Check out this picture of a great newsletter, where you can read its content.
When presented with the unpleasant experience of reading Matt Levine's newsletter:
I obtained the code for this from Firefox. Subsequently, I implemented it within WebKit and made a few modifications.
I offer an alternative version of LibRedirect, which redirects annoying webpages to better, open-source alternatives.
I have added instructions for installing the Rose browser on Ubuntu 20.04, which is the version I am currently using.
If you are a dear friend who is using Linux, please reach out for assistance if you run into any difficulties while attempting to install this.