LiveG Sphere Browser

Sphere, the web browser designed for the LiveG ecosystem. Bringing you power, speed, functionality and more.

This repository is licensed by the LiveG Open-Source Licence.

Sphere is a web browser which is written in JavaScript using Adapt UI and Zapr. The browser is very portable and is supported by a wide range of platforms. Sphere is built on top of Electron so that it is a standalone application which can be compiled into gDesk OS apps, Linux binaries, Windows executables, macOS apps and more.

Sphere is also going to be the app runtime for LiveG gDesk OS apps, allowing for web apps to be integrated into the system, with APIs available to control it.

Prerequisites

In order to develop Sphere (and do things such as building Sphere), you'll need the following installed:

• Zapr (with Zapr added to your PATH)
• Python 3 (with the py utility added to your PATH)
• PIP (can be installed on Linux with the python3-pip package)
• Node.js (with the npm utility added to your PATH)

Building Sphere

To build and test Sphere, run this at the command line in the project root directory if you're using Bash (for gDesk OS, Linux and macOS):

$ ./build.sh

Alternatively, run this in Command Prompt at the project root directory (for Windows):

build

This should then build Sphere by using Zapr, build the documentation files also by using Zapr and finally run Electron via npm. If you want to specify command-line arguments that Sphere should use when it runs, just append them to the end of the command.

Distributing Sphere

To distribute Sphere for your current device's platform, run this at the command line in the project root directory if you're using Bash (for gDesk OS, Linux and macOS):

$ ./dist.sh

Alternatively, run this in Command Prompt at the project root directory (for Windows):

dist

The binary should be in the dist directory (which is ignored by Git due to the large file sizes).

This should do the same as building Sphere, except instead of running Sphere at the end of building it, it packages Sphere into a binary for your device's platform. In order to distribute Sphere for other platforms, you'll need to run the respective commands on said platforms to get their binaries.

Available command-line arguments

Below is a list of command-line arguments that you can use with Sphere in order to take full control of it.

--debug

--debug     Enter debug mode for Sphere.

Launch Chromium Dev Tools when Sphere runs (Sphere's debug mode) so that it can be debugged.

--fullscreen

--fullscreen
            Display the page in fullscreen, without Sphere's UI.

Display the page in fullscreen when Sphere has loaded, in the exact way that fullscreen mode in Sphere works. You can exit fullscreen afterwards with keyboard shortcuts.

--help

--help      Display this help screen.

Display the help screen that is a simpler equivalent to this section.

Aliases: -h, /?

--lang

--lang      Force the UI language to be the locale specified.
            <locale>            The locale code to be used. For example, English (United Kingdom) would be `en_GB`.

Force the UI language to be the locale (in the format xx_XX where the first two letters are the language and the last two are the country) specified.

--mirroring-direction

--mirroring-direction
            Force the UI text mirroring direction to be the direction specified.
            ltr                 Use the left-to-right (LTR) text mirroring direction.
            rtl                 Use the right-to-left (RTL) text mirroring direction.

Force the UI text mirroring direction to be the direction (either ltr for left-to-right mirroring or rtl for right-to-left mirroring) specified.

Note: This does not affect the direction of static pages as that is specified by the --lang argument.

--privasphere

--privasphere
            Cause the first tab to be a Privasphere tab.

Cause the first tab to be a Privasphere tab so that pages loaded in the tab are not recorded in Sphere's browsing history, and that all site data from the tab will not be saved.

--url

--url       Load the page from the URL specified when Sphere has loaded.
            <url>               The URL to load.

Set the first tab to be the URL specified (instead of being sphere://newtab as normal) when Sphere has loaded.

Note: Use this in conjunction with --fullscreen or --window to automatically set up Sphere to be the browser of a kiosk system. Beware that users could close or otherwise maliciously use Sphere by using keyboard shortcuts.

--window

--window    Display the specified page in a window, without Sphere's UI.

Display the page in a window, hiding Sphere's main browser UI ─ tabs and other features will be disabled.