browser-home (Part 2)

This is a continuation of the browser-home blog entry that I wrote yesterday.

I worked on my browser-home project a bit today, preparing eight screens and many icons. The only remaining task for my initial, hand-made version is the creation of a favicon. The UI works great, but I ran into a major issue… Firefox no longer allows you to configure a custom URL to load in new tabs! There are some extensions that do so, such as New Tab Override, but extensions do not have access to the filesystem!

I can get around the issue by loading the page (and assets) over the network. One option is to serve it on the local network (::1), but I am not so keen on running an extra process. Another option is to serve it on my website (or GitHub Pages). I prefer to not make requests over the internet, but a benefit would be that I could easily access the page from any computer.

Another way to get around the issue would be to implement the page using a single HTML file that embeds all of the assets (including images). That HTML file could then be stored in the extension storage, bypassing the filesystem limitation. That would work particularly well with SVG icons. I could easily create SVG versions of the majority of my current icons, but I would need to replace some icons that have raster sources. Using base-64 encoding to embed raster icons would be easier but less elegant.

I will give it some thought before making a decision. Time for a hike!