I'm pleased to announce version 2.1 of browser-proxy, a script which lets you use Tear (or other alternative browsers) as the default browser on Maemo devices. With xiojason's agreement, I'll be taking over as the primary maintainer from now on; many thanks to him for his work on this so far!

The script itself can be downloaded from
http://xio.com/maemo/browser-proxy.txt, or you can use the Debian package (browser-proxy_2.1-1.deb) attached to this post. Installing the Debian package will take care of installing and setting up the script for you; if you want to install manually, see the instructions in xiojason's original post.

The headline change is the new configuration file. browser-proxy will look for /home/user/.config/browser-proxy on startup, and if found will load its configuration from that file. The format is simple:
If there's no config file found, the script will use its built-in defaults (continuous_mode = 0, default_browser = "tear"). When running in continuous mode, you can get the script to reread its config file by sending it SIGHUP (kill -HUP pid).

(If you've been using the patches I posted earlier on top of 2.0, there is one significant change to the config file: the URL that replaces the %s in other_browser_cmd is now automatically quoted, so you no longer should quote %s in the other_browser_cmd string.)

Changes in this release:

• The script now supports using a configuration file (see above) -- no need to edit the script to configure it now.
• Out-of-the-box support for launching Fennec and Midori.
• Add the ability to launch browsers other than those directly supported in the script (see above).
• Changes to support a wrapper script replacing /usr/bin/browser.

Changes to the Debian packaging in this release:

• Add a wrapper script replacing /usr/bin/browser, to ensure that launching MicroB via /usr/bin/browser always works.
• Conflict with the proposed fennec-dbus-proxy (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=499904); the two do roughly the same thing and probably shouldn't be co-installed.

Source for the Debian package (.orig.tar.gz, .dsc, .diff.gz) is contained in the attached tarball.

Future directions:

• I'm working on getting a Garage project set up to host the code.
• A configuration UI; it looks like if we want a control panel applet, it's going to have to be written in C? Thoughts? Comments on what it should look like?
• I have no idea whether this works at all on Fremantle, though my suspicion is that it wouldn't take much work to get it working there. Reports/patches welcome if you're adventurous.
• Once we have a UI, get this into extras where more people will find it.

EDIT: fix a link