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iPhone App: Change ‘Privately’ Browser Homepage

June 8, 2009 / posted in Google, Hack, howto, iPhone / 1 Comment

The DiNozzo method. Not pretty, but it’s effective.

- Leroy Gibbs, NCIS

I downloaded the Privately Web Browser from the App Store this evening, but was a little disappointed that it doesn’t include the ability to change the home page.  Having jail broken my iPhone hours after getting it, though, the workaround was pretty obvious.

By default, Privately uses http://start.sax.net as it’s homepage. This really doesn’t work for me, as I like to have Google at the ready, and although it has a search box, I like having the ability to search images/groups/etc… at one click instead of two. This method will work for nearly any site, though. To change the start page, simply do the following:

  1. Open Terminal (again, you will need to have jailbroken your iPhone, and be slightly comfortable with a *nix CLI).
  2. ping the site that you want for your homepage so you can get it’s IP address. ping google.ca -c 1 works well, as it will only ping once and won’t flood your console before you can ^C out of it. At time-of-posting, the IP for Google.ca was 64.233.187.104.
  3. If you have sudo installed, type sudo nano /etc/hosts (replace nano with your favorite editor, such as emacs or vim). If you don’t have sudo, type su -, then your root password, and then nano /etc/hosts.
  4. At the bottom of the file, enter “64.233.187.104   start.sax.net” (without the quotes, and using whichever IP address you want instead of Google’s).
  5. Save changes and exit.
  6. Close Terminal and open Privately.

You’ll noting that the address still shows as start.sax.net, however the site you chose will load as the home page.

A few things to note:

  • This won’t work if you want a specific page on a site (eg, www.example.com/whatever.html)
  • If the server hosts multiple sites off one IP address, you’ll get whatever the default site for that IP address is (which, in some cases, will be a placeholder page)
  • If you don’t know what a CLI is, or have no idea what nano, emacs, or vim are, this isn’t for you.
  • And, of course, you’re iPhone needs to be jailbroken. If you haven’t done it and don’t know how, I won’t offer support. Plenty of information here.