Building a web browser in PyQt: Lecture 11 with Mozzarella Ashbadger

In Lecture 11 of Mozzarella Ashbadger’s PyQt tutorial series, we will be building a web browser using PyQt. A web browser is a great project to tackle with PyQt as it allows us to work with networking, handling user input, and displaying web content in our PyQt application.

To get started with building our web browser, make sure you have PyQt installed on your machine. If you don’t have it installed, you can do so by running the following command in your terminal:

pip install PyQt5

Once you have PyQt installed, we can start building our web browser. Create a new Python file and import the necessary modules:

import sys
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication, QMainWindow, QAction, QLineEdit, QWebEngineView

Next, create a class for our main window that will contain our web browser:

class WebBrowser(QMainWindow):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()

        self.init_ui()

    def init_ui(self):
        self.setWindowTitle('PyQt Web Browser')
        self.resize(800, 600)

        self.url_bar = QLineEdit()
        self.url_bar.returnPressed.connect(self.navigate)

        self.browser = QWebEngineView()
        self.setCentralWidget(self.browser)

        nav_bar = self.addToolBar('Navigation')
        nav_bar.addAction('Back', self.browser.back)
        nav_bar.addAction('Forward', self.browser.forward)
        nav_bar.addWidget(self.url_bar)

    def navigate(self):
        url = self.url_bar.text()
        if not url.startswith('http'):
            url = 'http://' + url
        self.browser.setUrl(QtCore.QUrl(url))

In this code snippet, we define a class WebBrowser that inherits from QMainWindow. In the __init__ method, we call init_ui to set up our user interface. In init_ui, we create a QLineEdit for the user to input a URL, a QWebEngineView to display the web content, and a navigation bar with buttons for going back and forward in history.

We also connect the returnPressed signal of the url_bar QLineEdit to the navigate method, which will load the URL entered by the user in the web browser.

Finally, we define the navigate method to handle loading URLs in the browser. We check if the URL entered by the user starts with ‘http’ and if not, we prepend it with ‘http://’. We then set the URL of the browser to the input URL.

To run our web browser, we need to create an instance of WebBrowser and show it:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)
    browser = WebBrowser()
    browser.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())

Now, when you run your Python script, you should see a simple web browser window with a navigation bar and a URL input field. You can type in a URL and press Enter to navigate to that page. You can also use the Back and Forward buttons in the navigation bar to explore your browsing history.

Congratulations, you have successfully built a web browser using PyQt! Feel free to customize and expand upon this project to add more features and functionality to your web browser. Happy coding!