I've used browserling[1] in the past for similar purposes.
Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps
#12Hello 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”.
What if this service had been set up that you pay for it and when you do so you get an virtual server instance automatically set up. From a security perspective you are running a own virtual private server isolated from the company that provides the software. From a usability point of view everything is spun up via some clever scripts, so you don't have to go through the hazzle of configuring the VPS.
I've been toying with this configuration and think it might be usable for some opensource projects.
Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps
#13Hello 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'm doing a lot of rather JS-calculation heavy projects. Then again a lot of this is leveraging canvases, how well would this approach with that sort of dynamic content.
I'd try for myself, but as I take it you are not doing this on a production scale the HN effect produces a lot of out error messages so I can't really see for my self.
Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps
#14Hello 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…
Seems like both the demo and the static mirror are down or suffering from HN hug
Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps
#15Hello 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…
Interesting. As the next step for automated testing, browsing on the cloud browser images can be automated with the kantu browser extension and its image and text recognition features https://a9t9.com/kantu/docs/xclick
Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Just want to say thanks for bringing this to my attention. I really want to go through it! I was also very surprised the sound effect still works using the tag!
Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Just want to say thanks for bringing this to my attention. I really want to go through it! I was also very surprised the sound effect still works using the tag!
In retrospect, it's not very good. lol! But when I was 10 years old, the idea of a virtual haunted house(and being able to inspect the HTML) was really cool. I suppose it's one of the things that inspired me to become the web developer I am today.
Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps
#18Doing this via images seems... backwards. It's crazy bandwidth-intensive and almost never suits the client. There are other raster-options (SVG would be lighter on bandwidth) but they still don't scale.
So why not just sanitise the DOM? Embed images. Remove script before sending. Add an event listener to send all events back to your server. User clicks, your server emulates and sends back a DOM diff. You'd need to do more work for things like :hover (et al) but it all seems more sustainable than sending full on rasters.
Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps
#19Doing this via images seems... backwards. It's crazy bandwidth-intensive and almost never suits the client. There are other raster-options (SVG would be lighter on bandwidth) but they still don't scale. So why not just sanitise the DOM? Embed images. Remove script before sending. Add an event listener to send all events back to your server. User clicks, your server emulates and sends back a DOM diff. You'd need to do…
On the surface this reminds me of Opera Turbo[0], but a lot of the details are different. Opera Turbo still seems to rely on the browser to do a lot of what you're suggesting the server should do.
Re: Show HN: Cloud browser – headless Chrome and image maps
#20Does this bypass all known forms of browser fingerprinting?
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