Kiosk vs OpenKiosk

Kiosk is a free, open-source PDF reader for web, desktop, mobile, and browser extensions. It renders PDFs and offers full-text search with highlighted results, page thumbnails, zoom, and light, dark, and night display modes. Its Chrome extension adds highlighting, underlining, strikethrough, drawing, shapes, and text annotations. The project says PDFs stay on the device, with no telemetry, cloud processing, or account requirement. Android works offline after installation, and the extension release notes also state that offline use is supported. The web app can run locally or be deployed through GitHub Pages as a self-hosted instance. Desktop apps can open PDFs directly and associate Kiosk with PDF files; the extension can intercept PDFs opened in Chrome. The extension supports Chrome 88+, Edge 88+, and Brave, but not Firefox or Safari. The project is released under the MIT License. Its Android release is an early alpha, and the macOS app is ad-hoc signed but not notarized, so Gatekeeper may warn on first launch.

OpenKiosk is a remotely configurable public browser terminal based on Mozilla Firefox. It runs as a system-integrated standalone browser, with system-level controls intended to keep public users within web browsing. Administrators can register devices for remote management using a token and change settings through a web interface. After registration succeeds, the token is removed from the device, so a backup token is needed for later device management.

Kiosk settings cover fullscreen display, toolbar and URL bar visibility, an on-screen keyboard, and whether bookmarks persist. Administrators can set session timers and choose whether cache, history, and cookies carry over. URL allowlists or blocklists are available, with a strict mode that checks page resources and may disrupt pages if rules omit required resources. The settings can disable local terminal access and start a clean browser profile. Downloads and uploads are labeled insecure when enabled; uploads can expose the terminal filesystem to web pages. OpenKiosk is free and open source under the Mozilla Public License. Current beta installation instructions require Debian 13 on x86_64 or aarch64 hardware.