Burrow: Gopherspace Explorer for Chrome

Easily navigate Gopherspace sites in Chrome using a public proxy

What is Burrow: Gopherspace Explorer for Chrome?

Burrow: Gopherspace Explorer for Chrome is an open-source extension for exploring and navigating Gopher sites using a public proxy. Gopher is the predecessor of today's World Wide Web, offering a simpler and cleaner user experience. With the absence of a native Gopher client in Chrome, Burrow makes it possible to access these sites by rewriting gopher:// links via Floodgap's Public Gopher Proxy.

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Stats

By: Different Squares

View on Chrome Web Store

Users: 1,000+

Rating: 4.33 (3)

Version: 0.5 (Last updated: 2022-08-25)

Creation date: 2020-05-25

Risk impact: Low risk impact

Risk likelihood: Very low risk likelihood

Manifest version: 3

Size: 53.27K

Email: di*****@googlegroups.com

Stats date:

Chrome-Stats Rank

# 26786 ▼ 38

Other rankings

#482 in Social Networking ▲ 4 #229 in javascript keyword 42 ▲ 11

Other platforms

Not available on Firefox

Not available on Edge

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Summary

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Burrow allows you to access Gopher sites using Chrome. Gopher is the predecessor of the World Wide Web and HTTP, so Gopher sites look very "dated" to today's users. However, Gopher provides a much simpler, cleaner browsing experience, and many former Gopher users fondly remember the Gopher web.

There is still a community of Gopher enthusiasts who continue to run servers and sites, but it can be hard to access these in standard browsers. Google Chrome, for instance, does not offer a native Gopher client. Burrow attempts to make Gopher access and navigation possible for Chrome users.

Currently this extension rewrites all gopher:// links to point to Floodgap's Public Gopher Proxy. It relies on Javascript to accomplish this, so make sure that Javascript is enabled!

Burrow is an open source project published under the MIT license. Source code is available at https://gitlab.com/burrow-project/burrow-chrome-extension.

v0.5 (8/24/22): Fix issue where new installation screen pops up on browser update

User reviews

Works great. The only suggestion I can think of would be to add some example servers to the plugin's popup (rather than needing to go to the info page to find those). Perhaps a search site, a weather site, a news site, and an encyclopedia page would be good examples.

Peter W, 2020-02-23

Did what it said it would do. Would be nice if we could get an index on a gopher site, but it was as advertised. Seems to disrupt the function of clicking the scroll wheel when installed, though.