In this article, we will see how we can create a tabbed browser using PyQt5.
Web browser is a software application for accessing information on the World Wide Web. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the web browser retrieves the necessary content from a web server and then displays the page on the screen.
Tabbing : Adding tabs complicates the internals of the browser a bit, since there will now need to keep track of the currently active browser view, both to update UI elements (URL bar) to changing state in the currently active window and to ensure the UI events are dispatched to the correct web view.
PyQt5 is cross-platform GUI toolkit, a set of python bindings for Qt v5. One can develop an interactive desktop application with so much ease because of the tools and simplicity provided by this library. It has been installed using the command given below
pip install PyQt5
GUI Implementation steps :
1. Create a main window
2. Create a QTabWidget for tabbing, set it as central widget, make them documented and closable, below is how the tabs will look like
3. Create a status bar to show the status tips
4. Create a tool bar and add navigation button and the line edit to show the url, below is hot the tool bar will look like
Back-End Implementation Steps :
1. Add action to the QTabWidget object when double-clicked is pressed
2. Inside the double click action check if the double click is on no tab then call the open tab method
3. Inside the open tab, method create a QUrl object and the QWebEngineView object and set QUrl to it and get the index of the tab
4. Add update url action to QWebEngineView object when url is changed.
5. Inside the update, url action check if action is called by the opened tab then change the url of url bar and change cursor position
6. Add another update title action to the QWebEngineView object when loading is finished
7. Inside the update title method update the title of the window as the page title if the action is called by the open tab only
8. Add action to the tabs when the tab is changed
9. Inside the tab changed action get the url update the url inline edit and the title
10. Add actions to the navigation buttons using the build-in functions of the QWebEngineView object for reloading, back, stop and forward buttons
11. Add action to the home button and inside the action change the url to google.com
12. Add action to the line edit when the return key is pressed
13. Inside the line, edit action get the text and convert this text to the QUrl object and set the scheme if it is null and set this url to the current tab
Below is the implementation
# importing required libraries from PyQt5.QtCore import *
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import *
from PyQt5.QtGui import *
from PyQt5.QtWebEngineWidgets import *
from PyQt5.QtPrintSupport import *
import os
import sys
# main window class MainWindow(QMainWindow):
# constructor
def __init__( self , * args, * * kwargs):
super (MainWindow, self ).__init__( * args, * * kwargs)
# creating a tab widget
self .tabs = QTabWidget()
# making document mode true
self .tabs.setDocumentMode( True )
# adding action when double clicked
self .tabs.tabBarDoubleClicked.connect( self .tab_open_doubleclick)
# adding action when tab is changed
self .tabs.currentChanged.connect( self .current_tab_changed)
# making tabs closeable
self .tabs.setTabsClosable( True )
# adding action when tab close is requested
self .tabs.tabCloseRequested.connect( self .close_current_tab)
# making tabs as central widget
self .setCentralWidget( self .tabs)
# creating a status bar
self .status = QStatusBar()
# setting status bar to the main window
self .setStatusBar( self .status)
# creating a tool bar for navigation
navtb = QToolBar( "Navigation" )
# adding tool bar tot he main window
self .addToolBar(navtb)
# creating back action
back_btn = QAction( "Back" , self )
# setting status tip
back_btn.setStatusTip( "Back to previous page" )
# adding action to back button
# making current tab to go back
back_btn.triggered.connect( lambda : self .tabs.currentWidget().back())
# adding this to the navigation tool bar
navtb.addAction(back_btn)
# similarly adding next button
next_btn = QAction( "Forward" , self )
next_btn.setStatusTip( "Forward to next page" )
next_btn.triggered.connect( lambda : self .tabs.currentWidget().forward())
navtb.addAction(next_btn)
# similarly adding reload button
reload_btn = QAction( "Reload" , self )
reload_btn.setStatusTip( "Reload page" )
reload_btn.triggered.connect( lambda : self .tabs.currentWidget(). reload ())
navtb.addAction(reload_btn)
# creating home action
home_btn = QAction( "Home" , self )
home_btn.setStatusTip( "Go home" )
# adding action to home button
home_btn.triggered.connect( self .navigate_home)
navtb.addAction(home_btn)
# adding a separator
navtb.addSeparator()
# creating a line edit widget for URL
self .urlbar = QLineEdit()
# adding action to line edit when return key is pressed
self .urlbar.returnPressed.connect( self .navigate_to_url)
# adding line edit to tool bar
navtb.addWidget( self .urlbar)
# similarly adding stop action
stop_btn = QAction( "Stop" , self )
stop_btn.setStatusTip( "Stop loading current page" )
stop_btn.triggered.connect( lambda : self .tabs.currentWidget().stop())
navtb.addAction(stop_btn)
# creating first tab
# showing all the components
self .show()
# setting window title
self .setWindowTitle( "Geek PyQt5" )
# method for adding new tab
def add_new_tab( self , qurl = None , label = "Blank" ):
# if url is blank
if qurl is None :
# creating a google url
# creating a QWebEngineView object
browser = QWebEngineView()
# setting url to browser
browser.setUrl(qurl)
# setting tab index
i = self .tabs.addTab(browser, label)
self .tabs.setCurrentIndex(i)
# adding action to the browser when url is changed
# update the url
browser.urlChanged.connect( lambda qurl, browser = browser:
self .update_urlbar(qurl, browser))
# adding action to the browser when loading is finished
# set the tab title
browser.loadFinished.connect( lambda _, i = i, browser = browser:
self .tabs.setTabText(i, browser.page().title()))
# when double clicked is pressed on tabs
def tab_open_doubleclick( self , i):
# checking index i.e
# No tab under the click
if i = = - 1 :
# creating a new tab
self .add_new_tab()
# when tab is changed
def current_tab_changed( self , i):
# get the curl
qurl = self .tabs.currentWidget().url()
# update the url
self .update_urlbar(qurl, self .tabs.currentWidget())
# update the title
self .update_title( self .tabs.currentWidget())
# when tab is closed
def close_current_tab( self , i):
# if there is only one tab
if self .tabs.count() < 2 :
# do nothing
return
# else remove the tab
self .tabs.removeTab(i)
# method for updating the title
def update_title( self , browser):
# if signal is not from the current tab
if browser ! = self .tabs.currentWidget():
# do nothing
return
# get the page title
title = self .tabs.currentWidget().page().title()
# set the window title
self .setWindowTitle( "% s - Geek PyQt5" % title)
# action to go to home
def navigate_home( self ):
# go to google
# method for navigate to url
def navigate_to_url( self ):
# get the line edit text
# convert it to QUrl object
q = QUrl( self .urlbar.text())
# if scheme is blank
if q.scheme() = = "":
# set scheme
q.setScheme( "http" )
# set the url
self .tabs.currentWidget().setUrl(q)
# method to update the url
def update_urlbar( self , q, browser = None ):
# If this signal is not from the current tab, ignore
if browser ! = self .tabs.currentWidget():
return
# set text to the url bar
self .urlbar.setText(q.toString())
# set cursor position
self .urlbar.setCursorPosition( 0 )
# creating a PyQt5 application app = QApplication(sys.argv)
# setting name to the application app.setApplicationName( "Geek PyQt5" )
# creating MainWindow object window = MainWindow()
# loop app.exec_() |
Output :