Elsurf: make your own HTML gadgets for your desktop

Elsurf is an extremely light and simple, fully-compatible, web browser for Elive. Its made from a fork of “surf” (webkit) and it features transparencies directly into your desktop :eyepopping:

Elsurf has many options, see its –help or manpage, you can disable many things like camera/audio, tracking, no cookies, no javascript? etc, run it as you wish.

It runs in a single window, no bars, no buttons, just web, any windows of web to browse internet or local files, you can try with the many included examples like:

for i in /usr/share/doc/elsurf/examples/*html ; do elsurf -ZM "$i" ; done

You can make your own gadgets for your desktop, its simple html !

Cookies

Cookies are saved in your ~/.cache/elsurf/cookies/ directory, each file is assigned to a domain, so you can perfectly erase them manually from your terminal or even edit them, restore, share among computers, etc!

Adblocker

Its featured with an extremely small and simple adblocker and enabled by default, it just block domains, you can edit your own list in ~/.config/elsurf/adblock.txt

Resources

Elsurf:

  • One instance: 126-150 mb
  • 10 instances: 1320 mb
  • CPU at 4.5 % running the synthwave music player

Chrome in app mode:

  • One instance: 300-400 mb
  • 10 instances: 1100 mb
  • CPU at 1.1 % running the synthwave music player

Note: seems like chrome has been improving in resources usage!

IMPORTANT: If you have a medium or low computer I do not suggest to have these gadgets running in your desktop, so since its a browser is a waste of resources, RAM and CPU, but the good thing is that not only “you can”, but also you can create your owns as you wish! :dance:


Do not miss the last part of the video! :omfg:

1 Like

Alas that conks out with:

(elsurf:146091): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 14:01:27.439: g_object_new_is_valid_property: object class 'WebKitSettings' has no property named 'enable-geolocation'

So looks like 'elsurf' will need to disable geolocation by default. :thinking:

Yeah that’s a bug, geolocation is one thing that doesn’t work on it

Isn't there a boolean somewhere to disable it? :thinking:

-g / -G , see the manpage, but was disabled by default in the code so was probably an issue, i just disabled it more bold since its an unworking feature