browser_mod 2

What if that tablet you have on your wall could open up a live feed from your front door camera when someone rings the bell?

And what if you could use it as an extra security camera?

Or what if you could use it to play music and videos from your Home Assistant media library?

What if you could permanently hide that sidebar from your kids and lock them into a single dashboard?

What if you could change the icon of the Home Assistant tab so it doesn't look the same as the forum?

What if you could change the more-info dialog for some entity to a dashboard card of your own design?

What if you could tap a button and have Home Assistant ask you which rooms you want the roomba to vacuum?

 

Installation instructions

• First make sure you have completely removed any installation of Browser Mod 1
  I.e. remove browser_mod: from your configuration.yaml and delete the integration from the integrations page.

• Either

  • Find and download Browser Mod under integrations in HACS
  • OR copy the contents of custom_components/browser_mod/ to <your config dir>/custom_components/browser_mod/.

• Restart Home Assistant

• Add the "Browser Mod" integration in Settings -> Devices & Services -> Add Integration or click this button:

• Restart Home Assistant

Note: If you are upgrading from Browser Mod 1, it is likely that you will get some errors in your log during a transition period. They will say something along the lines of Error handling message: extra keys not allowed @ data['deviceID'].

They appear when a browser which has an old version of Browser Mod cached tries to connect and should disappear once you have cleared all your caches properly.

Quickstart

1. Install browser mod
2. Thoroughly clear your browser cache
3. Go to the Browser Mod panel in your sidebar
4. Make sure the "Register" toggle is checked.
   This is required in order to enable backend services to target this browser.
5. Refresh the page (F5)
6. Go to Developer Tools -> Services
7. Select service "Browser Mod: popup (browser_mod.popup)"
8. Check the "Title" checkbar and write something as a title
9. Enter some text in the "Content" text box
   Not yaml or anything, just any text for now.
10. Click "CALL SERVICE"
    The button is likely grayed out. That's a Home Assistant visual bug. Click it anyway.
11. A popup dialog should now open on all your Registered Browsers.

Here's a great overview of the functionality by Smart Home Scene.

 
 

Browser Mod Configuration Panel

After installing Browser Mod you should see a new panel called Browser Mod in the sidebar. This is where you controll any Browser Mod settings.

See Configuration Panel for more info

 

Browser Mod Services

Browser Mod has a number of services you can call to cause things to happen in the target Browser, such as opening a popup or navigating to a certain dashboard.

See Services for more info

 

Popup card

A popup card can be used to replace the more-info dialog of an entity with something of your choosing.

To use it, add a "Custom: Popup card" to a dashboard view via the GUI, pick the entity you want to override, configure the card and set up the popup like for the browser_mod.popup service.

The card will be visible only while you're in Edit mode.

As long as the popup card is (would be) visible, i.e. you stay on the same view; whenever the more-info dialog for the entitiy you selected would be opened, the popup card will be shown instead.

Yaml configuration:

type: custom:popup-card
entity: <entity id>
card:
  type: ...etc...
[any parameter from the browser_mod.popup service call except "content"]

Note: It's advisable to use a fire-dom-event tap action instead as far as possible. Popup card is for the few cases where that's not possible. See services for more info.

Browser Player

Browser player is a card that allows you to controll the volume and playback on the current Browsers media player.

Add it to a dashboard via the GUI or through yaml:

type: custom:browser-player

FAQ

How do I access the FullyKiosk Browser special functions?

Make sure to activate the Javascript Interface. The browser-mod panel will guide you through the rest of the required and suggested settings.

Why doesn't ANYTHING that used to work with Browser Mod 1.0 work with Browser Mod 2.0?

Browser Mod 2.0 has been rewritten ENTIRELY from the ground up. This allows it to be more stable and less resource intensive. At the same time I took the opportunity to rename a lot of things in ways that are more consistent with Home Assistant nomenclature.

In short, things are hopefully much easier now for new users of Browser Mod at the unfortunate cost of a one-time inconvenience for veteran expert users such as yourself.

Why does my Browser ID keep changing?

There's just no way around this. I've used every trick in the book and invented a handful of new ones in order to save the Browser ID as far as possible. It should be much better in Browser Mod 2.0 than earlier, but it's still not perfect. At least it's easy to change it back now...

Note that you can also set the browser ID to e.g. whatever by adding ?BrowserID=whatever (N.B. capital B) to any Home Assistant URL.

How do I update a popup from the Browser mod 1.5?

If you have used fire-dom-event it's really simple. Just change

action: fire-dom-event
browser_mod:
  command: popup
  title: My title
  card:
    type: ...etc...

to

action: fire-dom-event
browser_mod:
  service: browser_mod.popup
  data:
    title: My title
    content:
      type: ...etc...

How do I uninstall Browser Mod?

Besides removing the integration as usual, there is one extra step needed. In order to work well with Home Assistant Cast Browser Mod will add itself to your Dashboard Resources, and you will need to remove it from there manually:

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