BriskBard web browser

[salvadordf]

Hi,

This is my first post in this forum and I would like to suggest BriskBard 1.7.1.

First of all, I'm the developer that created BriskBard. I hope I'm not breaking any forum rule for self-promotion. If so, please accept my excuses and feel free to delete this post.

BriskBard is a freeware web browser for Windows that also includes an email client, a media player, a news aggregator, an FTP client, a newsgroups reader, a contact manager, an IRC client and several web developer tools.

It uses multiple open source components (OpenSSL, Hunspell, CEF4Delphi, SQLite, Indy, etc.) and I'm the maintainer of one of those projects called CEF4Delphi at GitHub. BriskBard can be considered "mostly" open source because only a small fraction of its code base is close source.

BriskBard has a fully portable version and it can even be executed from a read-only device, although I would recommend to use a USB drive to store bookmarks, messages, settings, browser cache, etc.

The default rendering engine is Blink and it's available in English, French and Spanish.

BriskBard is available here : https://www.briskbard.com

The full features list is here : https://www.briskbard.com/index.php?lan ... d=features

[SYSTEM]

First of all, I'm the developer that created BriskBard. I hope I'm not breaking any forum rule for self-promotion. If so, please accept my excuses and feel free to delete this post.

You're not. We like it when developers drop by.

[Midas]

We like it when developers drop by.

Indeed we do.

[freakazoid]

Wow! Very impressive!

I haven't checked it out yet, but I say impressive just based on the features list. Those that miss Opera 12 might like BriskBard for the integrated email client and news aggregator. The FTP client, IRC and newsgroups reader are bonuses.

I'll definitely check this out when I have a chance.

[Emka]

Wow, I'll try this out.
Exactly what I've been looking for since Opera dropped the mail client and Vivaldi doesn't seem to implement it.

[salvadordf]

Thank you for trying BriskBard!

If you have some suggestions or you find an issue don't hesitate to use the "Send suggestion..." or "Send bug report..." options in the menu button.

[webfork]

More to come on this, but BriskBard is evidently based on the IE engine.

[salvadordf]

More to come on this, but BriskBard is evidently based on the IE engine.

It uses 3 rendering engines to show web pages :

• Blink : This is the default and it's used by Chromium, Chrome and many other browsers.
• Trident : Used by IE.
• BriskBard's own rendering engine : I created this engine from scratch and it's used for email messages, newsgroup articles and the news aggregator (RSS feeds).

The first versions of BriskBard used Trident as default but I added Blink in 2017 as the new default engine.

Trident is only available in the installer version of BriskBard because it needs registry modifications to work correctly.
The portable version only allows you to use Blink and BriskBard's own engine.

[salvadordf]

I received some messages about the videos.

BriskBard uses CEF to be able to use the Blink rendering engine. The CEF libraries are built with the open source codecs to avoid legal problems with patent owners. This means that, for now, H264 videos don't work inside the browser tabs using Blink but they work correctly inside the browser tabs using Trident.

Some web pages require Flash. To use it in BriskBard's portable version you need to copy some of its files to the "Flash" directory as described here :
https://www.briskbard.com/index.php?lang=en&faqitem=105

Adding Flash will also improve the compatibility for some web pages like twitch.tv

[salvadordf]

For more details about the rendering engine used in a web browser tab, load this address :

chrome://version/

You will see something like this if you use Blink :

Code: Select all

CEF	74.1.13+g98f22d3+chromium-74.0.3729.108
Chromium	74.0.3729.108
OS	Windows
WebKit	537.36 (@daaff52abef89988bf2a26091062160b1482b108)
JavaScript	7.4.288.25
Flash	32.0.0.171
User Agent	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.108 Safari/537.36 BriskBard/1.7.1
Command Line	"C:\Program Files\BriskBard\BriskBard.exe" /w --no-sandbox --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.108 Safari/537.36 BriskBard/1.7.1" --lang=en-US --log-file="C:\Program Files\BriskBard\debug.log" --log-severity=disable --disable-features=VizDisplayCompositor,NetworkService --enable-gpu-plugin --enable-accelerated-plugins --enable-system-flash --enable-media-stream=1 --enable-speech-input=1 --enable-smooth-scrolling --enable-fast-unload --disable-client-side-phishing-detection --safebrowsing-disable-auto-update --safebrowsing-disable-download-protection --disable-background-networking
Module Path	C:\Program Files\BriskBard\libcef.dll
Cache Path	C:\Users\usuario2\AppData\Local\BriskBard\cache

[webfork]

BriskBard uses CEF to be able to use the Blink rendering engine.

Thanks for the clarification. I also wanted to reply to something from your post on Reddit last year.

Being the only developer, I feel much safer if developers from countries with no copyright law can't make rebranded copies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comme ... d_browser/

I just want to point out there are a great many open source projects out there that don't keep parts of their code closed, and are doing just fine. We definitely have seen rebranded copies used without giving credit to the creators and acknowledge that as an ongoing problem, but I'd suggest there are other benefits that make it worth the trouble. A few nice things:

• Open projects tend to stick around long after other projects have faded away. If something should happen to you, its possible for someone else to pick up the mantle and continue your work.
• Companies tend to accept open source software internally more readily than closed programs.
• More attention from users and sites like ours (in part because of the above items).

Anyway, just an idea.

---

Softpedia mirror: https://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/ ... Bard.shtml

[freakazoid]

File details
Download size: 88.7MB
Uncompressed size: 243MB (255,397,888 bytes)

Safesearch DB takes up 75MB. I would suggest removing that from the distribution ZIP file and downloading it on-demand if it is selected in the configuration area.

Quick review:

When you launch Briskbard, there is a landing page asking what you want to launch. All features are called "tabs," which is a little awkward since the browser also has tabs and the default new tab action is a browser tab. I would just remove the "tabs" word altogether.

Browser does not support Chrome extensions, even though it is using the Blink engine. There is a private browser tab, but you can only launch it through the main menu. There is a native ad blocker that appears to block by domain only. There are numerous themes, which is good if you're into that sort of thing. The address bar is not customizable at the moment. I would usually remove buttons such as Home and Refresh. Would be great if mouse gestures support was implemented. Overall, the browser is basic, but gets the job done.

RSS (or as Briskbard calls it "Aggregator") works surprisingly well. I was impressed.

Email set up worked well, but afterwards, it tried to download every single message from the mail server. There should be more configuration options here before attempting to fetch email for the first time. I didn't proceed further because downloading all email would have taken hours.

FTP worked, but the layout is a little unconventional. The remote file tree is shown on the left side, while your local file tree is shown on the right. In most FTP managers, the local is on the left and the remote is on the right. A configuration option to change this would be great. When you want to download or upload a file, you have to click on a button to do this action. Most FTP managers allow you to simply double-click on the file to perform the download or upload.

The media player isn't the greatest and the layout is, again, awkward. The left side displays a sidebar of sorts and the right side takes up the visuals. If you have Briskbard maximized, then the right side is too big in my opinion. The left "sidebar" doesn't appear to do anything other than display the filename and you can only add one file at the moment. I'm guessing the sidebar is there so you can use it as a playlist in the future though. Audio files played with no problem, video files were a little more problematic as you cannot seek.

I didn't try the other features like newsgroups, irc, telnet, whois.

Memory usage as a whole isn't too bad. Around 150MB after launching. Overall, I'm impressed that one developer has tried to implement a bunch of features into one program. I would probably remove the Media Player as better 3rd-party programs do a far, better job here.

[webfork]

Quick review

Thanks for the breakdown

[salvadordf]

Quick review

Thank you very much for your review!

I'll try to add as many of these suggestions as possible.

[salvadordf]

Hi,

I just released a new version of BriskBard with some of the suggestions made by freakazoid. Thanks again!

BriskBard 1.8.0 can now be used to connect to the Tor Network!

I added this feature because several users asked me to add a VPN or some other way to avoid firewalls.