Web page

What this tile is

Web page is a Control Panel tile with somebody else's website inside it: the Twitch Stream Manager, YouTube Studio, a donation dashboard, a Companion page on your own network. It is the same idea as a browser dock in OBS, and it is there for the same reason: the page you check ten times a stream stops being a window you have to alt-tab to.

It is not a module and nothing has to be installed for it. The entry sits at the top of the Add module list whatever else you have.

How to set it up

1. Open Control Panel, press Edit, then Add module. Web page is the first entry in the list.
2. Under Popular dashboards there are five ready ones: Twitch Stream Manager, YouTube Studio, StreamElements, Streamlabs, DonationAlerts. One press adds the tile.
3. For anything else, type the address into Page address and press Add. The https:// part can be left out. Tile name is yours to pick; left empty, the name is taken from the address.
4. Sign in inside the tile, the way you would in a browser. A tile is a browser, so the site's own sign-in works there, and so does the detour through a platform: press the site's own “Log in with Twitch” and the platform page opens in the tile, then hands you back to the dashboard.
5. The sign-in lasts, and it is shared. It survives closing the app, and every Web page tile uses the same one: sign in to a site in one tile and a second tile on that site is already signed in. So it is done once, not once per tile.
6. The magnifier in the tile header, Tile scale, runs from 60 to 250%. It changes how big the page is drawn inside the tile, not how big the tile is: a dashboard built for a full screen is readable in a quarter of one at around 70%.
7. Two more buttons sit in the tile header. Reload page loads the page again, which is the first thing to try when a dashboard has gone blank or stale. Open in browser hands whatever the tile is showing to your usual browser.
8. Links to other sites open in the browser, not in the tile. A viewer's link posted in the Twitch chat panel would otherwise sit in your tile for the rest of the stream, with the dashboard gone. The site's own pages and its sign-in stay inside.
9. When the tile has left the site you added, it says so. A sign-in page you abandoned halfway, or a page the dashboard sent you to, would otherwise stay in the tile until a restart. While the tile shows another site, a line at its top names both, for example "This tile left streamelements.com and now shows twitch.tv", and Back to streamelements.com opens the address you added again.

What can go into Page address

• A normal web address. Anything reachable over https:// is accepted.
• A plain http:// address is accepted only for your own network: a Companion panel, a capture device, a camera. A public site over plain http:// is refused, and the message says so.
• No login and password written into the address itself. Sign in inside the tile instead.
• Not strAImer's own address. The app refuses to open itself in a tile.

What a page in a tile can reach

A tile holds a website, and a website is not a program on your computer. Inside a tile it is fenced in, and the fence is worth knowing: it decides what a dashboard can touch from there and what it cannot.

• A public site in a tile does not get at OBS, a Companion panel, a camera or your router the way a page in an ordinary browser would. Requests like those are turned away, strAImer's own address included. The site is not told why, so from its side a button simply does nothing.
• It cannot use your camera, microphone, notifications or your files. Every such request from inside a tile is refused.
• It cannot download anything. A download link in a tile does not start a download. Instead a line appears at the bottom of the tile, "Downloads do not work inside the control panel. Open the site in your browser to download the file.", with an Open in browser button beside it and a × that closes the line.
• Its sign-ins are kept apart from the app's own. Signing in to a platform inside a tile is not the same as connecting that platform to strAImer, and the accounts you connected to strAImer are not visible to the tile.

The deliberate exception is a tile you pointed at your own network yourself. A page opened at a local address is allowed to reach other local addresses, because that is the whole point of putting a Companion panel in a tile: it exists to talk to OBS, and fencing it off would leave you with buttons that do nothing. This is also why plain http:// is accepted only for your own network. Nothing gets in that way unless you typed the address in.

The cost of the fence, said plainly: a public site whose job is to drive OBS on your machine will not do it from a tile. In your browser it still works, so Open in browser is the answer there.

A fence is not full protection, and that is worth saying plainly. It stands in the ordinary way a page takes to a local address, and a site written to get around it has routes left. It cuts down what somebody else's dashboard reaches by accident; it does not make a hostile site harmless. So a tile is for the sites you trust, the ones you would sign in to in your browser.

What it cannot do

• The address cannot be edited. The tile has no gear and no settings of its own. To point it somewhere else, remove the tile and add the page again.
• Removing the tile removes the address with it, and a removed tile cannot be brought back with the page it was showing.
• The address does not travel. It is kept encrypted on this computer, apart from the panel layout, so it is not carried into a backup or onto another machine. A layout restored elsewhere shows the tile with a note that it has no page address; add the page again there. The sign-in stays behind for the same reason.
• Duplicating a panel page copies the addresses, but if any of them could not be copied the app says so straight away, naming it as web page tiles copied without their address.
• Reload page reloads what the tile shows now, not the address you first typed. If a site has walked the tile somewhere else, restart the app or remove the tile and add the page again.
• Each tile is a browser of its own and costs memory like one: over a hundred megabytes each is normal. Half a dozen of them on one panel page is a real load on the machine you are streaming from.
• Nothing on the page is sent to your stream. This is a screen for you: strAImer does not read the page, does not act on it, and does not put it into OBS.