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Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps

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Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps

#2

Post by epitactic »

Hello Hacker News, I made this as a quick weekend project after getting inspired by Ian Bicking's _The Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked To Try_ submission last week, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304802. Specifically, the "cloud browser" concept. Also partly inspired by https://html.brow.sh/, but as a text-based browser browsh is much more limited than Cloud Browser.

https://cloudbrowser.website/ runs a headless Google Chrome instance on a VPS, loading a website and taking a screenshot using NodeJS puppeteer. The links are iterated to create an image map, so you can browse (many) websites as normal, but through the cloud. Not all websites work yet, but many do.

Why is this useful? While this is only a simple prototype, it is an experiment in a new way to browse the web which I believe shows promise. Websites have become increasingly complex, heavy on JavaScript and HTML5 features. Cloud Browser pushes this complexity to the cloud, so you can browse websites requiring JavaScript without enabling JavaScript on your end-user browser, for example.

It is still in its incipient stages, but I welcome any feedback/suggestions on how to expand and refine this concept, or better yet, code contributions ;) feel free to fork on GitLab.

Source code: https://gitlab.com/epitactic/cloudbrowser/

Live demo of Cloud Browser loading Hacker News: http://cloudbrowser.website/b/https://news.ycombinator.com/

Static mirror if the VPS is down: https://epitactic.gitlab.io/cloudbrowser/

Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps

#3

Post by jotto »

epitactic wrote: post #2

Hello Hacker News, I made this as a quick weekend project after getting inspired by Ian Bicking's _The Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked To Try_ submission last week, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304802 . Specifically, the "cloud browser" concept. Also partly inspired by https://html.brow.sh/ , but as a text-based browser browsh is much more limited than Cloud Browser. https://cloudbrowser…

I made a similar attempt at this a couple years ago, to allow browsing the (JavaScript) web with JavaScript disabled. It works by proxying all traffic through a headless Chrome instance... but a screenshot + an image map is even better.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prerendercloud-dis...

https://www.prerender.cloud/

Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps

#4

Post by godot »

epitactic wrote: post #2

Hello Hacker News, I made this as a quick weekend project after getting inspired by Ian Bicking's _The Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked To Try_ submission last week, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304802 . Specifically, the "cloud browser" concept. Also partly inspired by https://html.brow.sh/ , but as a text-based browser browsh is much more limited than Cloud Browser. https://cloudbrowser…

Wow! When I saw "image map" on the title I thought this can't actually be talking about the HTML image map. Image map reminds me of HTML from the late 90s, and give me a good nostalgia of making personal homepages from that time. With invisible clickable divs, absolute positioning css and what not, it seems like image map has become a thing of the past. I'm guessing the requirement of making it work with no JS took you to the path of using image maps. Neat technique.

Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps

#5

Post by kilburn »

epitactic wrote: post #2

Hello Hacker News, I made this as a quick weekend project after getting inspired by Ian Bicking's _The Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked To Try_ submission last week, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304802 . Specifically, the "cloud browser" concept. Also partly inspired by https://html.brow.sh/ , but as a text-based browser browsh is much more limited than Cloud Browser. https://cloudbrowser…

This is a fun experiment, but I cannot see the long-term advantage of what you are doing vs VNC (or similar) on the web.

I'm pretty sure it would take less effort and give better results if you just hooked the viewer to something like a guacamole [1] session tethering you to a remote browser.

http://guacamole.apache.org/

Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps

#6

Post by ravenstine »

godot wrote: post #4
epitactic wrote: post #2

Hello Hacker News, I made this as a quick weekend project after getting inspired by Ian Bicking's _The Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked To Try_ submission last week, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304802 . Specifically, the "cloud browser" concept. Also partly inspired by https://html.brow.sh/ , but as a text-based browser browsh is much more limited than Cloud Browser. https://cloudbrowser…

Wow! When I saw "image map" on the title I thought this can't actually be talking about the HTML image map. Image map reminds me of HTML from the late 90s, and give me a good nostalgia of making personal homepages from that time. With invisible clickable divs, absolute positioning css and what not, it seems like image map has become a thing of the past. I'm guessing the requirement of making it work with no JS took y…

I always thought the map element was an underutilized feature. When I was a kid I really enjoyed glorified mazes like the Bone Garden Estate, which inspired me to make my own stateless "games" using MSPaint and HTML.

It didn't really teach me anything about programming, but it seemed like such a novel thing to put hyperlinks on parts of images.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010301200926/http://www.bonega...

Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps

#7

Post by c256 »

epitactic wrote: post #2

Hello Hacker News, I made this as a quick weekend project after getting inspired by Ian Bicking's _The Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked To Try_ submission last week, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304802 . Specifically, the "cloud browser" concept. Also partly inspired by https://html.brow.sh/ , but as a text-based browser browsh is much more limited than Cloud Browser. https://cloudbrowser…

Firstly: nifty idea, and neat prototype of said idea. :thumbs up:

Second: If my cloud browser has all of my credentials, do I care that my cloud browser is the process that’s pwned instead of my local browser? I think I don’t, so the main benefit would seem to be something like “view a certain static-ish subset of JS-required websites on a device that can’t/won’t run JS”.

Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps

#8

Post by executivetech »

epitactic wrote: post #2

Hello Hacker News, I made this as a quick weekend project after getting inspired by Ian Bicking's _The Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked To Try_ submission last week, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304802 . Specifically, the "cloud browser" concept. Also partly inspired by https://html.brow.sh/ , but as a text-based browser browsh is much more limited than Cloud Browser. https://cloudbrowser…

Can I see popup and the stuff which opens in another window?

I might have employment opportunity for you, one of our products need something similar

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