Balayer

Purpose:

It's yet another web browser. Only HTML, text and images are rendered. It has the peculiarity to be entirely written in Python, though based on many C-written pieces.

The idea of it came because I like Opera's way of browsing, but it is too buggy on Linux, so when I saw someone had written a HTML rendering widget with rather few dependencies, I decided to write my own web browser.

This has led me to write other software pieces that are needed to run balayer for the most part: python-gdkinput, python-cschtml, gladepyc. The latter was independant from Balayer at start, but finally I decided that Balayer would be a good demonstration for it; At the same time, I had to implement features in gladepyc to implement Balayer, so they both benefitted from each other.

Features:

• Single window navigation: web pages are displayed in a notebook rather than in separate Windows.
• Clicking on a link displays the new page systematically in a new tab, and does not focus it automatically. This is to ease parallel loading of pages.
• Non-blocking loading: you can continue viewing pages while documents and images are loading.
• Bookmark manager: shows and manage separate bookmark trees for each supported bookmark format. No native bookmark format, it uses others'. Planned: Opera, Lynx, Netscape.
• Should be quite fast and light (memory and disk footprint); At least it is on my host.

Disclaimer:

I wrote this browser primarily for me, so ergonomically that's what I prefer. I you don't like its ergonomy, please don't complain to me. I may in the future add options to set the behaviour to more traditional way of doing, but for the moment I'm concentrating on main implementation, so you will have to return to Netscape ;-)

Requirements:

Python (1.5.2), Gtk+ (1.2.8), gdk-pixbuf (0.9.0), libart (2.2.0), PyGtk (0.6.6), CscHTML (1.1.0), python-cschtml (0.5), python-gdkinput (0.5).

(Note: earlier versions may work, I just didn't test.)

Gtk+, gdk-pixbuf and libart were taken from Helix Gnome 1.2.4.

Python and PyGtk are easily found in any distribution, though you may have to recompile PyGtk to get the right version (not sure what is really necessary).

I will try to provide x86 binaries for CscHTML, python-cschtml and python-gdkinput as soon as possible.

Where:

Python sources (nothing to compile) are in this tar-gzip archive: balayer 0.1.

The traditional screenshot:

The future:

• finish to implement (still a lot missing: bookmarks, cache purge)

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