TinySurfer

A tiny web browser. Whatever version of WebKit it is that comes with PyQt4 does most of the work, but this adds a surprising amount of functionality in only 53 lines of code.

The first version was based on this:

http://thecodeinn.blogspot.com/2013/08/tutorial-pyqt-web-browser.html

But later I found this, which uses more of QWebKit's built-in functionality:

http://ralsina.me/weblog/posts/BB948.html

The current version of this is mostly what you'll find on that second link. I just de-obfuscated the one bit of lambda abuse, because I think otherwise it's a solid piece of code for learning purposes. The original author (Roberto Alsina), wrote in a comment on that page that the code is under an MIT license. I'm using the same license.

Here is the original author's later versions of the code on GitHub:

https://github.com/ralsina/devicenzo

So, you might ask, why did I do this?

I actually needed something like this for work: I was working remotely on a heavy-duty CentOS Linux box that had no graphical browsers installed, but a new piece of hardware recently installed used a web interface. In the lab we can bring it up on a Windows box, but it had remote access disabled. I probably could have built Firefox or tried to find a portable Linux version or something, but our tools already used PyQt4, so why not?

I can't promise anyone else will ever run into this obscure use case, but it certainly helped me.

To-Do Exercises Left to the Reader

1. Add some bookmarking functionality. I wanted to get this in before the initial commit, but it's the end of the weekend. I wanted to add something a little more interesting (e.g. categories) than the one implemented in the first link.

2. Add tabs. If you look at the original author's GitHub page, he's got this functionality, but I'd rather make each tab run in a separate process.

3. Upgrade to PyQt5. PyQt4's WebKit apparently leaks memory, so use the current incarnation at your own risk!