A macOS screen saver that displays a web page or a series of web pages.
This is a fork of the original by liquidx that makes the following changes:
- Fixes several deprecations (e.g. replacing
NSURLConnectionwithNSURLSession) - Sets the webview’s user agent string to that of Safari so more pages render correctly (many sites treat the default user agent as an obsolete browser)
- New thumbnail that’s a bit more eye-catching (no retina unfortunately - a 2x thumbnail is supplied, but a bug in the screen saver prefpane prevents it from rendering)
- Minimum macOS version raised to 12.0 Monterey
Download the latest release, unpack and double-click to install. Binary is signed and notarized so gatekeeper shouldn’t grouch at you.
Open up System Preferences > Desktop and Screen Saver > Screen Saver and WebViewScreenSaver should be at the end of the list.
In the addresses section fill in as many websites as you want the screensaver to cycle through and the amount of time to pause on each.
Tip: To edit a selected row, click once or tap Enter or Tab.
Passing in a negative time value e.g. -1 will notify the screensaver to remain on that website indefinitely.
Need some website ideas? Check out suggestions in the examples section.
Local absolute paths can also be used as an address with or without the file:// schema.
E.g. file:///Users/myUser/mySreensaver/index.html
Note: If you are running Catalina or newer the provided path cannot reside in your personal folders which require extra permissions (this includes things like Downloads, Documents or Desktop) but can be anywhere else in your user's folder.
If you are interested in scripting configuration changes, WebViewScreenSaver, like most other screensavers, makes use of the macOS defaults system.
This can be queried and updated via:
defaults -currentHost read WebViewScreensaveror directly (if installed for current user or should find it in /Library otherwise)
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'Print' ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/WebViewScreenSaver.*Code is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 License.