nimbus

Nimbus is a somewhat hacky Web browser coded in Python 3, using either Qt 5 via PyQt5, or Qt 4 via either PyQt4 or PySide. It is tailored specifically for my use case, but I have open-sourced it due to 1) personal ideology, and 2) personal convenience. Maybe someone will find it useful for something.

Features include:

• Tabbed browsing
• Browser history, including a cache
• Very limited support for loading pages offline
• Incognito (private browsing) tabs
• Printing pages
• Automatic saving/loading of the user's browsing session, reducing the damage done by a crash
• Ad blocking via either Adblock Plus filters or a modified hosts file
• Basic support for extensions and user scripts
• YouTube video downloads via user script (you can enable this in the Settings dialog under the Extensions tab)
• Support for HTTP and Socks5 proxies
• Partial support for the HTML5 geolocation, fullscreen and offline mode APIs
• Really hacky support for RSS and Atom feeds, if feedparser is installed. You can enable the feed button in the Settings dialog under the General tab.
• Using Netscape plugins to handle some HTML5 audio and video (useful on Windows, where QtWebKit doesn't support audio and video tags)
• Options to toggle features such as JavaScript, Netscape plugins, DNS prefetching, and XSS auditing, among others
• A tank you can enable and use to "wreck up" sites you don't like (no, seriously. It's in the Settings dialog, under the Extensions tab)

Dependencies

Nimbus depends on Python >=3.2 and either PyQt5, PyQt4, or PySide, with python3-dbus and feedparser as optional dependencies. It is possible that it will work in versions of Python 3 below 3.2 as well, but this has not been tested before.

Nimbus does not work in Python 2.x and I have no plans to support it.

You can install all of Nimbus's dependencies on Debian-based platforms using the following command:

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pyqt5 python3-pyqt5.qtwebkit python3-dbus python3-dbus.mainloop.pyqt5 python3-feedparser

Running Nimbus on Linux

Simply run the following:

./nimbus

Alternatively, you can try the following:

./lib/nimbus.py

Installing Nimbus on Linux

Note: You don't have to install Nimbus in order to run it; see previous section.

If you want to install Nimbus system-wide, you will need setuptools. On Debian-based platforms, you can install it with the following command:

sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools

Once that's done, run the following:

sudo python3 ./setup.py install

Uninstalling Nimbus on Linux

Simply run the following:

./uninstall.sh

Running Nimbus on Windows

Nimbus also works using Portable Python; this is currently the recommended way of running it on Windows. To start Nimbus, open the /lib folder and run nimbus.py. Unfortunately, this is not a long-term solution unless Portable Python starts bundling PyQt5; see The future of Nimbus for more details.

The compile_windows.py script is deprecated and has been broken for quite some time now. It will likely be removed in the near future.

Enabling portable mode

Portable Python makes it possible to run Nimbus off a flash drive. For true portability, Nimbus also supports a portable mode in which settings are saved to whatever folder Nimbus itself is contained in, as opposed to the user's home folder on the local hard drive. To enable this mode, simply create a file named portable.conf and insert it into the /lib folder.

Running Nimbus on OS X

There is currently no procedure for installing Nimbus on OS X, since I don't own a Mac and have no way of testing it. However, if you can install Python 3.2+ and PyQt5, you should (theoretically) be able to start it from the command line. If you own a Mac and can manage this, please let me know how it turns out; I'd be very curious.

Translations

Nimbus supports translations by way of QTranslator. To write a new translation for Nimbus, make a copy of translations/en_US.ts, rename it to the ISO code for the desired locale, and edit away. Once you're done, run compile_translations.py on Linux/OS X/Unix, or lrelease on Windows. You will need lrelease to be installed. Do note that the translation files are badly out of date.

The future of Nimbus

In the long run, PyQt5 will drop support for QtWebKit in favor of QtWebEngine. Supporting both of them at once will be infeasible, meaning that Nimbus will only support QtWebEngine in the future. This also means dropping support for both PyQt4 and PySide, unless PySide actually picks up the slack and starts supporting Qt 5.

Licensing information

See LICENSE.md for more details.