Development status Active Operating system Stable release 0.7 Engines WebKit, GTK+ | Written in C Initial release date 2009 Programming languages C | |
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Developers Christoph Lohmann, Troels Henriksen, Enno Boland | ||
Overriding browser style with surf
surf is a minimalist web browser developed by suckless.org. The user interface of this browser does not include any graphical control elements; it is controlled via keyboard shortcuts or external tools, which may manipulate its behavior by setting its window's properties.
Contents
How to surf the internet without a web browser
Features
surf is intentionally limited in its set of features. The only graphical elements the browser has are the page view itself and a small line indicating download progress. The main functionality of the browser is implemented in third-party WebKitGTK+ library, and the rest of the program only provides a window and a set of XProperties to control its behavior. While surf supports cookies, it does not include some other common features of web browsers such as tabbed browsing, bookmarks or ad filtering. Instead of an address bar, the _SURF_URI XProperty has to be set to user-requested uniform resource locator (URL) for the browser to follow it. By default, surf configuration includes a keyboard shortcut for calling dmenu program to prompt user for URL.
All configuration of surf is performed by editing configuration header file or directly browser's source code before compilation, and most of the browser's settings (with exception of several command line arguments) can't be altered later.