Homeless Browser

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  A warning for a potentially unsafe domain

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  A warning for a .exe address which may try to install something

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  A screenshot of the full menu

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  A warning for an insecure protocol (http instead of https)

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  The popup window when adding a new site

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  The icon used for the executable

Inspiration:

The Homeless Browser application was originally inspired by a story that became a meme. Essentially, a guy is hired on to help develop a piece of software. They fixed a single bug and then handed in their two weeks' notice. As it turns out, they were a regular user of the software and wanted to correct something that had been bugging them for a long time. For a more personal inspiration, I found that having to repeatedly re-navigate to frequented pages tends to get annoying, especially when having to see an ad-filled homepage every time. Additionally, bookmarks are not saved between browsers. Thus, I wanted to create something to address all these problems at once. In both my case and the case of the programmer from the story, we each noticed something that was bugging us and each wanted to address it.

What it does:

The Homeless Browser is a single-menu application that allows the user to save site URLs and browser paths to a single location to quickly access web pages from different browsers. The application will also warn the user if they are trying to add or access a potentially unsafe site. If the user does not want the warnings, they can toggle them in the help menu, where a number of guides are present for things such as using the application, finding the URL, or copying the path to a browser.

How we built it

The Homeless Browser was built in python and uses tkinter for the GUI. The program was built with help from Microsoft Copilot. It was made in VSCode and was converted to an executable using auto_py_to_exe.

Challenges I ran into:

The Homeless Browser was actually the third Idea, as the other two quickly became unrealistic. While working on the application, I ran into issues with Electron and React, major vulnerabilities from Node.js and the Node GUI, and general unresponsiveness. Eventually, I settled on tkinter and worked from there as it resulted in the fewest obstacles. The biggest issue was most certainly identifying where all the other issues came from, as I had to carefully scour the whole folder and load it with console.log()s.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of and lessons learned:

Recently, I have found that my biggest achievements are almost exclusively when working on a team. Thus, I challenged myself to fly solo here to see what I could accomplish on my own. Through the course of this weekend, I have learned new ways to identify and bypass issues in code, more about the Python language, how to use tkinter, and how to convert python programs into executables. In all, while what I made may not be as fancy or substantial as the creations of other teams, I feel I really accomplished something, and I'm happy about that.

What's next for Homeless Browser

Like the person in the story this project was inspired by, I will repeatedly return to the Homeless Browser to add more features as I feel they are needed and/or convenient. However, the one thing I want to do most is share this application with others who feel the same lack of patience for web navigation that I do. Therefore, I feel the best next step would be to create a website from which you can download the application from.

Built With

• python
• tkinter