In a nutshell: hbro is a minimal KISS compliant browser for linux written and configured in Haskell, still in development but pretty usable.
Informations about versions, dependencies, source repositories and contacts can be found in hackage.
- Do only one thing...
- Modern browsers include many features that could be easily externalized ; actually, life would even be easier if those features were independent and shared with all desktop applications. Such features are for instance tabs, bookmarks, history, downloads, adblocking, passwords saving, self-updating. A UNIX-compliant browser should just be flexible enough to call external tools for such jobs.
- ... but do it well
- Browsing well first implies making our way through the mess of web standards that are growing harder and sloppier; sometimes it means breaking some other golden rules, but there's no choice.
- Keep It Simple, Stupid
- Simplicity is not only compatible with but also essential to a powerful application. It often comes together with lightweight, scalable and easy-to-hack qualities.
- Robustness & stability
- Let's spend our time in developing new features rather than in tracking rare bugs. Let's go slow but sure.
- Extensibility and programmable interface
- Targets are advanced users who have various expectations ; to be sure everyone is happy, configuration should use a programming language, and an interprocess interface should be available. As he who can do the most can do the least, the default configuration should be suitable for users that cannot afford/don't want to spend (waste ?) their time in tweaks.
- Keyboard driven
- Special attention should be given to allow keyboard control of the browser whenever possible ; however, this should not become an obsession in cases where mouse use is obviously a more convenient solution (yes, such cases do exist).
- Free software
- Hbro is distributed under the Do-What-The-Fuck-You-Want-To public licence, which has a pretty self-explanatory name :) .
Note that some of these principles are taken from the suckless manifest.
- Programming language : Haskell
- Modern, purely-functional language that makes it possible to work with a short, elegant and robust code.
- Layout engine : WebKit
- Webkit seems to be the only one being open-source, (kind of) standards-compliant and providing a Haskell binding. It's then not much of a choice, fortunately it's not that bad.
- UI toolkit : GTK+
- Given the above programming language and layout engine, there's no much choice left for the UI toolkit.
- Interprocess interface : ZeroMQ
- Socket-like interface that implements various convenient communication schemes like request-reply and publish-subscribe.
- Configuration system : Dyre
- Dynamic reconfiguration library for haskell programs.
Apart from the programming language, if you happen to find a better alternative for one of these points, please note that suggestions are more than welcome :) .
By default, a pretty limited configuration file (see Hbro/Main.hs) is used to build hbro. You can create your own at ~/.config/hbro/hbro.hs to override it. Several extensions are provided with the * hbro-contrib * package, including a featured and self-explanatory example of configuration file.
Patches or suggestions are welcome to deal with the following issues. See package description for contact address.
- Flash videos make hbro freeze
- The demo webkit browser for haskell's binding has the same problem, so it doesn't seem to come from hbro itself.
- When toggling to source mode, current webpage is reloaded
- This is an undesired behavior since the webpage may have changed after reloading; webkit's API allows to get the content of the DOM but only inside the body tag; it is also possible to store the HTML source as it is downloaded, but then any further change in the DOM (for example triggered by javascript functions) wouldn't be visible.
- No cookies management available
- The Haskell binding is missing some necessary functions that make it impossible to act on cookies management.
- Configuring a proxy is impossible
- This feature would make use of to the webkit_get_default_session function. Unfortunately, Webkit's Haskell binding doesn't provide such function for now.