Gosub Beacon — GTK browser

Beacon is a GTK4 browser built on the Gosub engine. The engine does the actual work (networking, cookies, storage, history, rendering); Beacon is the native chrome around it. It exists to test the engine in a real application, so don't expect a daily driver — but basic browsing works.

Currently working:

• page loading and rendering (Skia rasterization, GPU compositing via GtkGLArea)
• tabs, back/forward with a tree-shaped session history
• bookmarks and visited history in sqlite, with a bookmarks bar and URL-bar completion
• downloads with a save dialog and a progress popover
• keyboard: Tab focus traversal, Enter on links, scrolling keys
• right-click context menu (open/copy link, image, save link as)
• internal pages: gosub://home, help, version, history, bookmarks and a settings editor on gosub://config
• favicons, cursor shapes, error pages, a JSON viewer
• crashed tabs show a reload page instead of taking the browser down

Not working yet: JavaScript, forms and text input, text selection.

More screenshots

All screenshots

Building

Beacon uses path dependencies into the engine, so check out gosub-engine next to this repository (../gosub-engine), on the beacon branch (upstream main plus engine work Beacon needs that has not merged yet).

Dependencies on Debian/Ubuntu, or similar on other systems:

sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libglib2.0-dev libcairo2-dev libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-dev \
                 libpango1.0-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev pkg-config \
                 clang libclang-dev libgl-dev libegl-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype-dev

Linux only for now. macOS and Windows shells will consume the engine's C API instead of this GTK code, but help with either is welcome.

Running

cargo run                          # opens the default startup tabs
cargo run -- https://example.com   # URLs on the command line become the startup tabs

Profile data (cookies, local storage, bookmarks/history, settings) ends up in ~/.local/share/gosub-beacon.