Fruit Bat Docs

Video, music & reading

Sound, picture in picture, Netflix and Widevine, Read aloud and Reader view.

  • No surprise sound. Electron lets every video start playing with sound by itself. Fruit Bat waits until you've clicked or typed on the page, like Chrome does. Silent previews still play. Settings › General › Video and sound can allow sound right away (for tabs opened after that).
  • Speaker on the tab while it plays sound. Click it to mute or unmute that tab. Right-click a tab for Mute tab, or Pop out video to open its video in picture in picture.
  • Right-click a video for Play/Pause, Mute, Loop, Show controls, Speed (0.5× to 2×) and Picture in picture. Videos with a normal address also get Open, Save and Copy address. Streamed (blob:) videos can't be saved. It finds the video under the pointer even beneath an overlay like YouTube's, and reaches videos inside embedded players. Fruit Bat draws its own menus, so these rebuild Chromium's video menu.
  • The screen stays awake while you watch: a video playing with sound, at least 320×180, visible in the tab you're on, or in picture in picture or fullscreen. Muted background loops, tiny players and audio alone don't count. Switching tabs, minimizing, pausing or closing lets the screen sleep again.
  • Protected content (Widevine): Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Prime Video, Spotify and similar sites need Google's Widevine. Fruit Bat is built on castLabs' Electron for Content Security, which downloads the Widevine CDM from Google's component updater on first launch, like Chrome.
    • Settings › Privacy & Security › Protected content shows its status, has Test playback (a Widevine-protected test video) and turns it off. Off means no download, no updates, and sites can't use it.
    • On Linux, the first install needs one restart; Settings has a Restart Fruit Bat button.
    • Never in Vampire Bat windows: DRM licence requests identify the device.
    • If it isn't ready yet (still downloading, needs a restart, off), a DRM site gets one explanation instead of a cryptic error code.
    • Commercial services need a VMP-signed build on Windows and macOS.

Read aloud#

  • Starting it: select text, then right-click › Read aloud; or Read page aloud; or Ctrl+Shift+U.
  • Voices: it uses the operating system's voices through Chromium's speech synthesis, run in the toolbar so pages can't interfere. Voices that aren't on the computer are never used.
  • Settings: voice and speed in Settings › General (ttsVoice, ttsRate).
  • Roost: speak.
  • On Linux: voices come from speech-dispatcher.

Reader view#

When a page looks like an article, a book button appears in the address bar. Click it, or press F9 (Ctrl+Alt+R, ⌘⌥R on a Mac), to read just the article.

  • What's removed: menus, ads, sidebars, cookie banners, comments and footers.
  • What's shown: a header with the site, author, date and reading time.
  • Settings: dark, sepia or light; serif or sans-serif; text size (A− / A+, or + and −); line width. Fruit Bat remembers them.
  • Summarize opens Echo on the article. In Reader view, Echo reads the clean article text.
  • Original page (or F9 again) goes back. Back and Forward also move between the two.
  • Address bar and bookmarks use the original address.

Safety: the article is pulled out in an isolated world, so the page's own scripts can't see it or change it. It arrives as a small tree of allowed elements, not HTML, and the reader page builds it with createElement. So nothing from the site runs in Reader view: no scripts, event handlers or javascript: links. The reader page can't make network requests. Images load from the site over the same connection as the page (through Tor in Vampire Bat), and no referrer is sent.