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

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

#311

Post by tombh »

jacquesm wrote: post #213
thaumaturgy wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been messing about with a toy search engine for a long time, and starting to tie it into my Pinboard bookmarks (6,000 and counting!), and the most irritating part of the whole thing for a while has been extracting useful text from modern websites. I'd considered using a headless browser setup but I never got 'round to it. If you structured this as a paid service where I could make some number of requests for som…

The web 1995-2005 or thereabout will be the best documented period of humanity and it is saddening to see how payload has been replaced by cruft to the point that we might as well have remote PDF viewers. So much for 'the semantic web' I guess.

This precisely the sort of thing that Browsh can remedy!

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

#312

Post by tombh »

hexadecimal7e wrote: post #228
tombh wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's be great if html.brow.sh could become a sophisticated proxy that stripped the web down to an absolute bare minimum. Yes I think travelers are the most likely to pay for it, but I think the poorer people of less developed nations would be the largest sector of users. Currently though html.brow.sh is non-interactive, as soon as I start letting people logging in it opens up a whole bunch of privacy concerns!

Thanks for the answer. Well, created a Linux container (Ubuntu 17.10) using lxc. Installed browsh. Works very very fine. Same issues as others found: * Forms not working in Firefox but works fine in the terminal. Google search... Some more testing: - use nginx as a proxy for browsh - configure the Firefox instance (install uBlock Orgin, remove history and set other privacy related configurations and hope it works. Ke…

Thanks for trying it out. How do you mean forms aren't working in Firefox but work fine in the terminal?

What made you think about using Nginx as a proxy?

You can already install Firefox extensions: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/45

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

#313

Post by tombh »

tsukikage wrote: post #200
tombh wrote: post #2

Some of you may have seen this before under its previous incarnation of "Texttop". Then it was just a hack, but I got some great feedback, so I've spent most of the last 12 months turning it into something serious. It's morphed into more than a mere TTY gimmick. That UNIX philosophy of text being the "universal interface" has somewhat unexpectedly risen to the forefront, such that Browsh is now essentially a text bro…

Stupid question: how do you follow links without a mouse? e.g. with Lynx you'd use the arrow keys / enter - this doesn't seem to work here, and there's nothing obvious in the keybindings document.

Sadly, it's not a feature yet, but it's planned: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/85

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

#314

Post by tombh »

deepnet wrote: post #271
tombh wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your advice, it's really helpful. I agree, I think it has a large gimmick factor, for which I don't think there's a huge amount of $ (though it does help spread the word). You have a good point about finding a niche in a large company. As others have mentioned this looks like it would be to do with endeavours out in the field so to speak, where the Internet is slow and/or expensive. So eg; military or ship…

I stepped up, now a Patron.

Thank you very much.

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

#315

Post by tombh »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #248
tombh wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your advice, it's really helpful. I agree, I think it has a large gimmick factor, for which I don't think there's a huge amount of $ (though it does help spread the word). You have a good point about finding a niche in a large company. As others have mentioned this looks like it would be to do with endeavours out in the field so to speak, where the Internet is slow and/or expensive. So eg; military or ship…

Add links to Patreon, PayPal, and Bitcoin right on the home page.

Woah, yeah, bold, why not.

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

#316

Post by tombh »

EB66 wrote: post #279
yazr wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldnt it make more sense to build this as a cloud service? So you connect (using ssh or chrome) to a dedicated host which sends you a digest of the page... You can also "zoom in" on elements if you want higher resolution. As a potential user, what are your opinions ? (Sort of like the Amazon Silk browser..?!) Edit: phrasing, and also looked at other comments

> Wouldnt it make more sense to build this as a cloud service? Definitely. Maritime companies and backcountry users probably won't be interested in messing around with a nifty open source tool nor the hosting infrastructure it'd require. They'll want this built out as a secure easy to use service. @tombh Feel free to get in touch if you're interested in building or optimizing for satellite users. I'd be happy to prov…

Definitely interested in this. It's exactly the thing that I imagined Browsh excelling at. I'm tom at tombh.co.uk

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

#317

Post by josh921 »

tombh wrote: post #304
josh921 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding financing, perhaps you should consider collaboration with the Tor Project. Many Tor users disable Javascript, because Javascript sometimes has anonymizing vulnerabilities. But disabling Javascript cripples many websites. But I can type html.brow.sh/ https://example.com via my Tor browser and get a non crippled website, even with Javascript disabled. This is a very practical use case and I think many will wa…

I'm not very familiar with Tor. But from what I gather I think Browsh will be of interest to Tor users more than Tor network itself?

What you need to know about Tor is that the network consists of clients and relays. Clients are mostly users with browsers. Many of which disable JS, because JS can de-anonymize sometimes. This breaks some websites.

Previously I could not visit CNN.com via a JS-disabled Tor browser, but now I can type https://html.brow.sh/https://edition.cnn.com/ and Viola! (Well, it's still a little crippled but much better than a blank).

So, brow.sh benefits JS-disabling users. The Tor project receives donations and they dedicate them to enhance Tor. And, I think this is a neat enhancement. While I am not totally familiar with their money handling, I wouldn't be surprised if they are willing to funnel some of the funds to various side projects that improve the Tor experience.

In summary, the use case you advertise is minimal bandwidth for clients, but you missed the privacy use case, which someone may want to fund.

Edit: grammar fixes.

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

#318

Post by josh921 »

tombh wrote: post #304
josh921 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding financing, perhaps you should consider collaboration with the Tor Project. Many Tor users disable Javascript, because Javascript sometimes has anonymizing vulnerabilities. But disabling Javascript cripples many websites. But I can type html.brow.sh/ https://example.com via my Tor browser and get a non crippled website, even with Javascript disabled. This is a very practical use case and I think many will wa…

I'm not very familiar with Tor. But from what I gather I think Browsh will be of interest to Tor users more than Tor network itself?

By the way SSH over Tor is also a viable use case

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

#319

Post by snarfy »

tombh wrote: post #307
snarfy wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run it as a service. I send in a URL and maybe TERM type, you send back the rendering complete with escape sequences etc. You might not see the need for this, but others will. I could see it being used in some back end workflow.

That's essentially what https://text.brow.sh is already doing right? Eg; `curl https://text.brow.sh/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17... | grep snarfy`

It's close, but it doesn't actually output the escape codes. It would be cool if there were different formats besides text and html. Maybe vt100.brow.sh, ansi.brow.sh, etc. That way when I curl it from a terminal it renders like the actual terminal client.

Add terms that commercial use of the site requires an account setup and some pricing info. They can always host it themselves, but like many things, most people would rather pay someone else to do it.

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

#320

Post by Endy »

tombh wrote: post #87
Endy wrote: post #84

Requiring a full version of WebExtensions Firefox is a real deal-breaker in terms of memory hogging (that and only having an x64 Windows binary). Why not do what Pale Moon, SRWare Iron, Chrome-Opera, Vivaldi (i.e. Opera-Chrome 2), and others have done, and create a full browser based on the FF code instead of requiring a separate install? Still, I think for all the major benefits of text-based browsing, Lynx, Links,…

Browsh's raison d'etre is really about saving bandwidth. I first had the problem of bandwidth whilst living in Ladakh in Northern India, where I simply could not use the modern web. I expect Browsh not to be run on the same machine as the user, instead it runs somewhere where there is good internet and the user then accesses its output via either SSH/Mosh or the HTML service. Linking to FF/Chrome's libs is certainly…

Did Links/eLinks/Lynx not provide a better benefit in terms of bandwidth? It seems like trying to process it the way you're doing would lead to more overall load, rather than less.
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