I’m building a simple browser, and I’d like to code most of it using HTML/JS/CSS. I cannot use iframes to display pages, due to frame-busting. What are my options?
The browser is not meant to be production-quality, but as a proof-of-concept for my thesis, similar to this interactive mockup. The main features it will need to support are:
Loading any page without frame-busting (even google.com),
Detecting when a link is clicked and opening it in a new frame, with the original one remaining intact.
I intend to write this using Web technologies, but it’s OK if it needs to be wrapped up in a small amount of something else, e.g., to turn it into an Android app. However, if it’s possible, it would be best if I could load the app as a web page. Finally, it is also preferable to be able to run the app on an Android device, but it’s OK if it only works on a desktop.
In researching this question, I came across a few options:
<iframe>. Google.com doesn't load at all in an iframe. I tried using the sandbox attribute, but it still didn’t load. Is there a way around this (for any page)?
Mozilla’s Browser API. This API was supposed to allow you to use the mozbrowser attribute in an iframe when building FirefoxOS apps. I suspect there’s no longer any way to access it. I couldn’t get the sample browser app loaded, and it seems that mozbrowser is not supported in WebExtensions. Did I miss something? Is there a way to make this work?
<webview> in a Chrome app. This is the only option that worked so far. I was able to download and install the sample browser app in Chrome. The one downside is that it seems to be Chrome-only (and I would prefer cross-platform or Firefox, all else being equal). Are there any issues with this option? Any way to make it run without Chrome?
Electron app with <webview>. While the setup here is more complicated than the previous option, it seems like the code would be very similar (there’s even a similar sample browser app). Are there any advantages/disadvantages to this option over the previous?
So, are there ways to make options 1 or 2 work? Are there perhaps other options?
HTML/CSS is a "language" translated by the browser into pages. You cannot code a browser in HTML. The easiest solution is to code it in C#.
I'm not sure if this is a good solution, but you can try Electron (nodeJS). You will only need to use JS/CSS/HTML.
Related
I want to know if a html video is being displayed on a browser, from outside said browser, ideally without any plugins or such.
Motivation - I am trying to add this feature to Caffeine which is a Linux utility which disables the OS screensaver if, say, you are watching a movie.
The flash support was done I believe by detecting the presence of particular files or folders created by the plugin.
Ideally I would like 1 solution, but if I get 2 solutions for Firefox and Chrome, that's good enough.
p.s. Ultimately this would involve python code, but I am not sure if that is sufficient to make this question on-topic, or if this belongs on Superuser or Unix&Linux
This reminds me of something a web browser I was building in VB .Net which needed to detect if there where web pages that had tags like <a href="tel: or <a href="smsI know you said you didn't want a plugin but I would think you could easily right a browser plugin for for just this. In fact not exactly what your looking for but theirs a script monkey script called Hangouts Unlimited which prevents you from getting annoying messages asking if your still awake while in a G+ hangout. I don't know much about python but I would recomennd trying to identify the elements of the tags and when ever it finds such tags to disable the screen saver. Obviously the hangouts unlimited doesn't affect the web browser and that is most likely why you prefer not to have a browser plugin because you need to access system files outside of the browser. But I hope this helps a bit.
I am trying to understand about Chrome (browser) development. I am very new to this and trying to figure out where to start in order to develop for Chrome Browser.
Just have a couple of questions:
What is the difference between Chrome Browser apps vs. plugins vs. extensions (not sure, if this question make sense. But, hope you got what I am asking for)
What kind of applications can I develop for Chrome Browser
What technologies do I need to learn in order to develop for Chrome Browser.
To answer your first question this explains the differences between apps and extensions (I think there's no better way to explain their nature):
https://developers.google.com/chrome/web-store/articles/apps_vs_extensions
What do you mean with "what kind of apps"?
You can develop both hosted and packaged apps if is that what you intended, give a look at this:
https://developers.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/index
Anyway the easiest way to start would be by building an extension, how-tos and
good documentation makes it good to start with:
http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted.html
Just to add to the above answer which was missing difference between Plugin and Extension is:
Plugin is a third-party library that is plugged-in to the browser and allows for being embedded on a webpage. It affects only the web page that is using the plugin.
Extensions change the browser UI, add menus or change overall look of the browser and can process each page that gets loaded.
So to sum it up - plugins add functionality and extra features to a particular webpage while extensions add functionality and features to the whole browser and change the behavior of the browser.
Just to add on new information since people may continue to hit this question: Chrome has basically deprecated plugins as of March 2017 (Chrome 57). If you go to chrome://plugins now, you won't see anything (you used to see a list of installed plugins with enable-disable links like for extensions).
It seems the reasoning is that the only plugins they actually wanted to allow you to enable/disable are Flash and PDF Viewer, both of which were moved to the Settings menus (if they weren't already there, not sure). The rest are considered to be integral parts of the browser. https://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/29/google-removes-plugin-controls-from-chrome/
Makes things a bit simpler to think about now.
I am working on a prototype for a project that is somewhat similar to the facebook's "like" button. Basically it's an embeddable piece of code that can integrated with any website.
I am looking for a way to fake this integration for a demo. Basically I want to show a familiar web page (like http://www.cnn.com) with my code already embedded. Since I obviously can't do the actual integration right now, I need some way of faking it.
The only thing I can think about is to use http://www.httrack.com/ to download the page I want, and then change it locally. The problem with this is that it is clear that the page is hosted locally and not on www.cnn.com.
Is there a better technique for doing this?
If you use Firefox browser, you can use Greasemoneky and with JavaScripts, embedd your content inside that page. You can eaven add events, that will open some popup windows, etc. to show action of such a script.
That is easy approach, there are ton's of examples in their forum, and good documentation, how to use it.
You can write your own userscript (i.e. greasemonkey) to modify the page on the fly.
Even though I think it's a bad idea to do this (not sure if stackoverflow allows to ask such questions), but what you can do is edit the hosts file (if you're on windows) and add a line
127.0.0.1 www.cnn.com
it means that when you visit the website cnn it will display the domain name in the browser but it will use your localhost server to display the content.
In my rails app I have a need to save some webpages and display them to the user as images. For example, how would I save www.google.com as an image?
There is a command line utility called CutyCapt that is using the WebKit-Rendering engine to render HTML-Pages into various image formats. Maybe this is for you?
http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/
Prohibitively difficult to do in pure Ruby, so you'd want to use an external service for this. Browsershots does it, for example, and it looks like they have an api, although I haven't used it myself. Maybe someone else can chime in with alternative but similar services.
You'll also want to read up on delayed_job or something similar, to make sure you're accessing those page images as a background task and that it doesn't interfere with your actual application.
You can't do it easily (probably can't do it at all).
Each page is just a text - html data. The view you want to make an image of is a rendered page. Browser renders the page using tonns of techniques like html parsing, javascript parsing, css parsing, font rendering, etc.. To make the screenshot of google page - you would need to do all the rendering somewhere in memory and then take a screenshot of rendered page.
That task is almost impossible (there is nothing fully impossible).
If you are really eager to donate tonns of time to accomplish that task - you should do this steps:
1) Find some opensource rendering engine. Firefox would do.
2) Find some way to communicate between ruby-on-rails and that engine.
3) Wire it all together and see the results.
However, I see steps 1 and 2 as nearly impossible.
Firefox addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146/
I would like to know if it is possible to modify Chrome or Firefox display settings, so that it would only show rectangles of HTML DOM objects? What I want to do is to decrease rendering engine job amount as much as possible, so it would only build layout of the page.
People usually refer to this mode of operation as "headless" (i.e. without UI).
Usually there's an additional requirement - to be able to run it server-side without the usual for client software installed. If you're running it client-side, I wouldn't bother about optimization, it shouldn't give you a big win anyway.
Otherwise, try searching using that term. I've seen it asked for several times, but haven't seen a working out-of-box solution.
[edit] just saw http://hg.mozilla.org/incubator/offscreen, which seems to be a headless version of Mozilla.
I wouldn't go as low-level as modifying the renderer. Instead, I suggest you use Firefox's Greasemonkey to replace the elements from the page with whatever it is you need. You'll need to know a bit of JavaScript, but it's not that hard.
However, this will only work on client side. If you want to do this on server-side ( so that it will work on any page a user requests through your own ), my guess is you'll need to grab the page's content in a string, and then modify it using a HTML parser.