After conversing a bit with one reader of my kiosk how-to, I was reminded how tricky it can be to really lock-down a modern web browser for kiosk use. It’s so tricky, that for my own needs I ended up writing my own browser.
Well, I figure it’s time to stop being stingy, so I am releasing the code to that browser under the GPL. You can find it on github, here:
https://github.com/alandmoore/wcgbrowser
Contributions would be welcome, as the code has some stupidities and shortcomings. It does work for my needs, and may work in a wide variety of situations, so feel free to make use of it.
I will, of course, appreciate code contributions from those so inclined!
Hi. I’m planning to create a kiosk using Debian ARM and was wondering if I’ll have to do anything special to make this work on ARM. Also, I’m am curious if there is any downside to using ‘chromium –app=url’ which would make you prefer this solution instead. Thanks in advance.
I have no first-hand experience doing this on ARM, but AFAIK none of this is platform-specific.
As for using chromium’s app switch, it really just comes down to some of the details that you may or may not want. For instance, if you want to clear the history and refresh to the home page after a certain timeout period, you’ll have to hack together a solution yourself. If you want to restrict users to certain websites, you’ll have to find your own firewall solution. If you want to display some bookmarks or various other controls, you’re out of luck.
I wrote wcgbrowser to address a lot of these type of issues; it solved a lot of kiosk-related problems for me, but depending on your goals chromium may work fine for you.