I’m building a simple browser, and I’d like to code most of it using HTML/JS/CSS. I cannot use iframes to display pages, due to frame-busting. What are my options?
The browser is not meant to be production-quality, but as a proof-of-concept for my thesis, similar to this interactive mockup. The main features it will need to support are:
- Loading any page without frame-busting (even google.com),
- Detecting when a link is clicked and opening it in a new frame, with the original one remaining intact.
I intend to write this using Web technologies, but it’s OK if it needs to be wrapped up in a small amount of something else, e.g., to turn it into an Android app. However, if it’s possible, it would be best if I could load the app as a web page. Finally, it is also preferable to be able to run the app on an Android device, but it’s OK if it only works on a desktop.
In researching this question, I came across a few options:
<iframe>. Google.com doesn't load at all in an iframe. I tried using thesandboxattribute, but it still didn’t load. Is there a way around this (for any page)?- Mozilla’s Browser API. This API was supposed to allow you to use the
mozbrowserattribute in an iframe when building FirefoxOS apps. I suspect there’s no longer any way to access it. I couldn’t get the sample browser app loaded, and it seems thatmozbrowseris not supported in WebExtensions. Did I miss something? Is there a way to make this work? <webview>in a Chrome app. This is the only option that worked so far. I was able to download and install the sample browser app in Chrome. The one downside is that it seems to be Chrome-only (and I would prefer cross-platform or Firefox, all else being equal). Are there any issues with this option? Any way to make it run without Chrome?- Electron app with
<webview>. While the setup here is more complicated than the previous option, it seems like the code would be very similar (there’s even a similar sample browser app). Are there any advantages/disadvantages to this option over the previous?
So, are there ways to make options 1 or 2 work? Are there perhaps other options?
HTML/CSS is a "language" translated by the browser into pages. You cannot code a browser in HTML. The easiest solution is to code it in C#. I'm not sure if this is a good solution, but you can try Electron (nodeJS). You will only need to use JS/CSS/HTML.