Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by tombh » Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 12:49 AM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #7

Is there a way to point it to a different Firefox installation path? It only looks at Program Files{x86} and then quits as it doesn't find the FF installation at Program Files.

Use the `-firefox` flag. However the Windows binary has other problems.

You can use the free live demos though: `ssh brow.sh` and https://html.brow.sh

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

#32

Post by adamredwoods » Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 12:53 AM UTC

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…

My guess is to try upselling features like anonymous browsing, ad-blocking, etc. Other ideas would require discovering use-case scenarios for corporate situations: can it be used as a cms-front end or a way to focus on text for localization? a11y testing? You never know.

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

#33

Post by tombh » Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 12:54 AM UTC

RSZC wrote: post #15

Pretty sweet! Curious: why headless firefox and not headless chrome? Also: 'its main purpose is...to reduce bandwidth.' How does this reduce bandwidth? Is the assumption that you would deploy browsh on a server and ssh/mosh against that, and the bandwidth savings are to the client? (But full bandwidth usage to the server)?

Curiously, Chrome doesn't support extensions in headless mode. And Browsh needs to run some custom CSS and JS to help with parsing, so Chrome was a no go. You can inject CSS and JS using the RPC though, but that RPC standard (https://remotedebug.org/) isn't yet supported by Firefox. So at the time I felt that using the webextension standard was a more cross-browser investment. Perhaps I should revisit that decision.

And yes you're right about the use of a remote server to make use of the bandwidth savings.

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

#34

Post by katzgrau » Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 12:56 AM UTC

The nice thing about text based browsers is that you can use them at work and everyone thinks you're cranking code but you're really just on HN

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

#35

Post by tombh » Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 12:56 AM UTC

brian_ wrote: post #17

I'm not sure what the desired outcome should be but successive iterations has strange results: https://html.brow.sh/https://html.brow.sh/https://html.brow.... https://html.brow.sh/https://html.brow.sh/https://html.brow....

That sort of thing is actually causing spikes in load on the cluster. I think the quickness of the requests must skip the cache. So it's a bug really, I just need to detect recursive URLs and extract the deepest link.

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

#36

Post by tombh » Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 12:57 AM UTC

Untit1ed wrote: post #13

What I really love is that (when the server is working) you can ssh brow.sh And then have a graphical browser from anywhere :D.

Thanks!

What are you seeing when the server isn't working?

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

#37

Post by tombh » Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 12:57 AM UTC

raffleslodge wrote: post #11

Not sure if it's just me but the page is down currently.

By down, do you mean this? https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/58

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

#38

Post by tombh » Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 1:01 AM UTC

adamredwoods wrote: post #32

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…

My guess is to try upselling features like anonymous browsing, ad-blocking, etc. Other ideas would require discovering use-case scenarios for corporate situations: can it be used as a cms-front end or a way to focus on text for localization? a11y testing? You never know.

What do you think of its potential for use in regions with slow and/or expensive Internet (South America seems to be the worst off here), where I could come to some arrangement with a local NGO/GO to fund server costs and development?

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

#39

Post by azernik » Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 1:02 AM UTC

genpfault wrote: post #10

> Browsh consists of a minimal Golang CLI client and a browser webextension. Most of the work is done by the webextension. When the CLI starts, it looks for a compatible browser (currently only Firefox) and starts it in headless mode. Once the browser has started it opens a remote debugging connection and installs the extension. So a browser wrapper .

In implementation, sure. But from the user's perspective, it's just a browser.

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

#40

Post by johnklos » Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 1:03 AM UTC

...aaand it's written in Go...

So it's modern in that it won't run on anything but popular platforms, and text-based in that it shows you text using a huge, multi-gigabyte program. Looks like links / lynx aren't going to be replaced any time soon.