Overbite Gopher Clients

★★☆☆☆

The Overbite Project is an effort to bring Gopher access to modern software and operating systems. Mostly in the form of web browser extensions, plus an Android app.

Unfortunately, modern systems are a moving target.

Why Gopher is still relevant

Firefox Extensions

Overbite has written three different Firefox extensions to enable Gopher access over the years:

1. OverbiteFF used the old extension scheme and connected to Gopher sites directly. No longer supported, and might work on SeaMonkey, but I wasn’t able to get it to work with the latest release.
2. OverbiteWX just routes gopher requests through the Floodgap Gopher Proxy, since the current extension system can’t make direct network requests outside of HTTP(S). It’s convenient, but it’s just as easy to bookmark the proxy. And of course you’re routing everything through one server.
3. OverbiteNX connects to a local, third-party Gopher component. You do have to install that component, but it should be faster (and slightly more private, keeping in mind that Gopher is entirely transmitted in the clear.) This sounds a lot better, but I haven’t been able to get it to work with Firefox on Linux so far.

(They used to have a Chrome extension too, but discontinued it when Chrome broke compatibility.)

Android App

Overbite’s Android app is still in alpha. I wanted to try it out, so I downloaded the .apk to my phone. It works, but it’s more a proof-of-concept than a full-fledged application. It handles the basics: gopher menus, documents, and searches, and it’ll both accept gopher links from your web browser and send web links back to it.

But there’s no history or bookmarks, and it can’t download files. The menu icons are all sized awkwardly bigger than the text. It hasn’t been updated since 2022, and it’s not clear whether anyone’s still working on it.

It does have one cool feature I haven’t seen in the other (all two of 'em) gopher clients I’ve tried: You can add a gopher site to your phone’s home screen.

Bottom Line

The Firefox platform seems to have moved on, and the Android app stalled at the barely-testable stage. I’ve had much better experience running standalone Gemini clients that also support Gopher, like Kristall and Lagrange.