Surfline

Surfline Browser

The Nautilus web browser — a high-density WebKit/WebEngine browser with dark mode, low-overhead tabs, and privacy features built in.

• Launch: python3 apps/Surfline/main.py or Ctrl+Alt+S
• Memory target: ~250 MB
• UI: PySide6 + QtWebEngine

Overview

Surfline is the largest app in Nautilus. It accepts a URL as its first argument (python3 apps/Surfline/main.py https://example.com) and opens it as the initial tab — this is how the desktop's global search opens web results.

Features

• Tabbed browsing — QWebEngineView tabs with a URL bar (src/window.py:245, ~1,760 lines).
• ReefShield — EasyList-style regex ad/tracker blocking via ReefShieldFilter and a request interceptor (src/reef_shield/).
• TideSync — JSON settings/history/bookmarks profiles, plus an optional AES-256-GCM password vault (PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256, 200k iterations) via cryptography (src/tide_sync/).
• Importer — imports bookmarks, history, and passwords from Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Brave/Opera (via sqlite3) and CSV (src/importer.py).
• Password manager — view/save credentials for a site, backed by the vault (src/dialogs.py).
• Persistent cache — assets/profiles/cache, custom user agent Surfline/1.0 (Developer Browser; ChompOS).
• Dialogs & extras — import dialog, settings dialog, JSON viewer (JsonTreeWidget), and an in-browser terminal widget.

Dependencies

Package	Purpose
PySide6	Qt + QtWebEngine plugins (bundled, no extra pip)
cryptography	Password vault encryption (AES-GCM)
System libs	libnss3, libxkbcommon0, libgl1, libegl1, libdbus-1-3

Privacy

Surfline ships dark-mode-first and blocks trackers/ads by default through ReefShield. Passwords are stored in an encrypted vault only if you enable it.