How an e-reader became my favorite web browser | Alexandre VicenteI recently decided to jailbreak my Kobo Libra Color and try out KOReader. When I decided to take a look at what plugins were available, one stood out: gemini.koplugin. I had dabbled with the Gemini protocol in the past and in fact this blog is available there, but just browsing from my laptop or phone it never really became a habit as I’d most likely already be using a web browser for something else.<br>But after trying it out on the Kobo, it turns out Gemtext really shines with the reduced distractions and client customization of an e-reader. As that plugin autoconverts Gemtext to a KOReader-friendly HTML page, everything behaves just like an e-book for rendering and page navigation, links are handled automatically and the custom gestures and UI work pretty well. While I still feel like Gemtext supporting some minor things like inline links and images would have been nice QoL improvements and it’s miles ahead of the experience of using the web with an E-Ink display or dealing with broken reader mode in some pages in Safari or Firefox.<br>A blog post being read using the gemini.koplugin via NewsWaffle.Of course, the main issue with a niche protocol like Gemini is the content will naturally be limited to the subset of users that are both technically inclined and interested in this sort of project. Thankfully though, the protocol’s proxy definition supports protocol translation and both this KOReader plugin and my favorite mobile and desktop client Lagrange support setting proxies for HTTP(S) content. I’ve been using Stargate which converts HTML to Gemtext and I’ve been having a good experience with more text-heavy sites like blogs, news and documentation sites. For blogs and news Stargate will automatically suggest opening with NewsWaffle which is a service optimized for proxying news sites. For sites that don’t render properly I’ve done some quick tests serving a PDF version rendered with Puppeteer to gemini.koplugin and that seemed to work well enough in a pinch, so it could be something I look into doing in the future.<br>Gemini did inspire a lot of new small internet protocols with varying levels of complexity and features, so maybe I’ll end up rolling my own one day with compression, QUIC and with a more secure alternative to TOFU. That could end up being pretty convenient to use with DNS tunneling on plane Wi-Fi compared to the web.