Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser

brow.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 330 posts

Re: Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser

#281

Post by sedachv »

tombh wrote: post #175
mattl wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea behind your wrapper but I think you’re mistaken regarding hidden. Things are hidden from browsers for a lot of reasons but a text browser should probably safely ignore them all as content and presentation are different.

I mean for example one of the big problems Browsh has is not rendering text that web developers have hidden in the DOM to be displayed on some kind of mouse interaction. So Browsh has to ask JS to query the `display: hidden`, `z-index`, etc values to ensure that it doesn't render text that is not intended to be displayed until after an interaction.

Displaying hidden text is one of the places where text browsers can "fix" broken web pages. There are broken web pages that hide the text you want to read until you click on some JavaScript modal, or some "Click to continue reading" link/button that breaks scrolling. w3m displays hidden text and greatly improves readability on many web pages.

You can argue that using the CSS display property is a bad hack around the poor performance of adding/removing DOM elements, but the general problem of trying to automatically adapt a GUI application to terminal display does not change (having the GUI be emulated in HTML that is meant to be displayed in the GUI of the web browser just adds a layer of indirection, difficulty, and inefficiency). On the other hand, web pages that are really hypertext documents wrapped in useless and inaccessible JavaScript and CSS can have all of the event handlers and CSS properties ignored, and become legible again. This is something that text browsers do well, and why text browsers continue to be relevant today.

Re: Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser

#282

Post by easytiger »

noobermin wrote: post #268
easytiger wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does work without X. I thought this too, but just untarred a firefox tar.bz from https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ And it worked on a VPS with nothing X related installed

Are you sure? [0] shows libxul contained in the firefox tar links to various X libs among other things, as the bug report I linked below mentions... [0] https://pastebin.com/eNvM4YSK

maybe but you dont need a running xserver

Re: Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser

#283

Post by ohiovr »

tombh wrote: post #166
primitivesuave wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not my favorite monetization strategy, but if you had enough people using your browser you could serve text-based ads in place of the now-pixelized image ads on the screen. To test this model right away, you could contact a developer-focused ad network like Carbon ( https://carbonads.net/ ) Another insidious idea is to pitch this browser to companies as a way to reduce wasted time on social media and time-was…

This approach has already crossed my mind, and its not my favourite either. But if it enables me to make Browsh my job then I'd be open to it. I actually already self-advertise Browsh at the bottom of every https://html.brow.sh page. So I'd certainly be open to placing a simple ad link there at least. Ha, the "reduce wasted time" idea is interesting one! Thanks for your support :)

I got a wild idea that I want to do myself for funding a hobby of mine. I am developing a similar software compared to yunohost or cloudron. The way I want to fund my hobby is by afflilate marketing. I am developing a solution for hosting, so it might make sense for someone to use it via digital ocean. All I got to do is provide a link as a their affliate member (which I am as of now not apart of) and my user gets a discount, digital ocean gets a customer, and I get about $20 dollars I think. There are several other programs like this by various other companies. What I think you might do with this idea is offer an affiliate deal for your users for isps or organizations that want to provide super low bandwidth services. I read recently there are still millions of modem users in the USA because of the various remote locations can't afford to bring a network in and no political will to do it either. Good luck to you, I think you got a good idea. I am not able to get it to work on docker at this time but I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Re: Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser

#284

Post by tombh »

exikyut wrote: post #233

$ ssh brow.sh (It starts, prints "Waiting for Firefox to connect") Then... panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference [signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x0 pc=0x6de976] goroutine 11 [running]: browsh/interfacer/src/browsh.handleMouseEvent(0xc4203d3b00) /home/travis/gopath/src/browsh/interfacer/src/browsh/tty.go:151 +0x36 browsh/interfacer/src/browsh.readStdin() /home/t…

This should be fix, let me know if you try again and it works.

Re: Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser

#285

Post by tombh »

rotorblade wrote: post #247
astatine wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also would find an Android version really helpful. Will save a ton of data when roaming and will probably perform better in poor connectivity regions (only 2G and no 3G/4G). Would be great to know how to get this on an Android device.

As I said elsewhere in this discussion thread: I tried it this morning (lineageOS). Got the arm binary from github, `chmod +x`-ed it on my computer and scp:ed it over to my phone. Ran the binary and got a quick flash of the screen and a `exit status 1` [in termux]. Have not looked into it more than that. Since `browsh` depends on headless firefox, which is not in the termux default repository (it seems), I guess it w…

I haven't made it clear enough on the homepage or the docs, but Browsh isn't designed to run on your own local device, be it a laptop or smartphone. Browsh is best run remotely and then connected to through either SSH/Mosh or the HTTP in-browser service.

Re: Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser

#290

Post by tombh »

aminmemon wrote: post #202

Seems great, but although it is unable to load HTML properly on few of the websites I tried. It overlaps the text content on each other. Although, is there any way we at draftss.com could contribute to the project?

Yeah, there's a lot of improvements to be made to the rendering engine.

Sure what sort of contribution were you thinking?

Post reply on HN