surf is a minimalist

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

developed by suckless.org. The

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

does not include any

graphical control element A graphical widget (also graphical control element or control) in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through direct m ...

s; it is controlled via

keyboard shortcuts In computing, a keyboard shortcut (also hotkey/hot key or key binding) is a software-based assignment of an action to one or more keys on a computer keyboard. Most Operating system, operating systems and Application software, applications come ...

or external tools, which may manipulate its behavior by setting its window's properties.

Features

surf is intentionally limited in its set of features. The only graphical elements the browser has are the page view itself and, optionally, the scrollbars. The main functionality of the browser is implemented in third-party

WebKitGTK WebKit is a browser engine primarily used in Apple's Safari web browser, as well as all web browsers on iOS and iPadOS. WebKit is also used by the PlayStation consoles starting with the PS3, the Tizen mobile operating systems, the Amazon Kindle ...

library, and the rest of the program only provides a window and a set of XProperties to control its behavior. While surf supports

cookies A cookie is a sweet biscuit with high sugar and fat content. Cookie dough is softer than that used for other types of biscuit, and they are cooked longer at lower temperatures. The dough typically contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of ...

, it does not include some other common features of web browsers such as

tabbed browsing In interface design, a tab is a graphical user interface object that allows multiple documents or Panel (computer software), panels to be contained within a single window (computing), window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching be ...

, bookmarks or

ad filtering Ad blocking (or ad filtering) is a software capability for blocking or altering online advertising in a web browser, an application or a network. This may be done using browser extensions or other methods or browsers with inside blocking. Hist ...

, though all can be implemented with patches, scripts, or external programs, with instructions available in surf's homepage. Instead of an

address bar In a web browser, the address bar (also location bar or URL bar) is the element that shows the current URL. The user can type a URL into it to navigate to a chosen website. In most modern browsers, non-URLs are automatically sent to a search eng ...

, the _SURF_URI XProperty has to be set to user-requested

uniform resource locator A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the World Wide Web, Web, is a reference to a web resource, resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific t ...

(''URL'') for the browser to follow it. By default, surf's configuration includes a

keyboard shortcut In computing, a keyboard shortcut (also hotkey/hot key or key binding) is a software-based assignment of an action to one or more keys on a computer keyboard. Most Operating system, operating systems and Application software, applications come ...

for calling the dmenu program to prompt the user for a URL. Most configuration of surf is performed by editing its configuration

header file An include directive instructs a text file processor to replace the directive text with the content of a specified file. The act of including may be logical in nature. The processor may simply process the include file content at the location of ...

in its

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

, and then (re)

compiling In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs tha ...

it. Some settings can be changed without recompiling, via

command-line argument A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via command (computing), commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user ...

s or hotkeys.

References

External links

* {{web browsers 2010 software Free software programmed in C Free web browsers POSIX web browsers Software based on WebKit Web browsers that use GTK Software using the MIT license

Features

See also

References

External links