Cascade (Browser)

A proof-of-concept simplistic web browser built in Electron.

Inspired by Zen, Arc, and Flow. Looks like Zen, feels like Arc (hint: no it doesn't), and is somewhat minimalist.

The purpose of Cascade was for three reasons:

1. To learn Electron further and how WebViews work
2. To see what was possible with Electron
3. Hack Club :)

As such, it is not recommended to daily drive this browser. It is just a browser to see what Electron's capable of (and myself).

What can Cascade do?

It can do basic web browsing tasks, such as:

• Back/forward and reload navigation
• Various keybinds (Ctrl+R, Ctrl+Shift+R, Ctrl+P, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+T)
• Tab creation and destruction, as well as loading favicons
• Basic support for context menus (e.g. Inspect, Select All)
• Save tabs on exit, so it loads them on next load
• Smart URL bar (direct URL, search, etc.)
• Browse!

It is missing quite a few additional features, (e.g. bookmarks, browsing history) but those are beyond the scope of this project.

How does Cascade work?

Cascade uses WebView(s) (yes, I know) as its main driver for Chromium. There are better and more supported solutions out there, such as WebContentView, but that goes beyond the scope of this project, as one of the reasons I chose not to use it is because it isn't easily embeddable into the DOM.

Example of the GitHub landing page running on a somewhat old version of Cascade (GNOME 48)

How to Build

Clone the repository and open a terminal window, but make sure you run the following commands with administrative privileges (e.g. Administrator on Windows, sudo on Linux/macOS).

In the repository main folder (where this README and main.js should be) run the following command to install dependencies, this may take a while:

npm i

To test out Cascade without building it, you can run:

npm run start

Depending on what platform you want to build for:

npm run build            # Current OS
npm run build-win        # Windows (win32)
npm run build-linux      # Linux
npm run build-mac        # macOS (darwin) untested

Running in administrative mode prevents any symbolic link errors. You can find the built binary/executable once done in /dist.

AI Disclosure (Gemini, GPT-4o)

AI was used in the making of this project, but only to:

• Fix small issues that were the outcome of other additions
• Additional code for other complex elements like Regex

The code is licensed under MIT.