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

brow.sh

161–170 of 330 posts

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or this one: https://github.com/daleroberts/tv

There really just needs to be a terminal API for true pixel graphics. Something like sixel but modernized and cleaned up. There's no need to hack in graphics on top of Unicode block characters, which negates backwards compatibility anyway.

iTerm2 has a escape codes for viewing images, but I haven’t seen any other terminals picking it up: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-images.html

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

#163
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…

> Also, I'd be interested in any opinions here about how to financially support this project. At the very least I'd just love to somehow make this my job. I think before you can answer that question you have to figure out if there are enough geeks like you who think this is a useful enough tool to run / use regularly. They'll likely pay you $. Alternately, find use case where even just a few users / companies would p…

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 shipping operations.

So at the moment I guess it's just best to hope as many different people and organisations see Browsh as possible and seeing what sticks and where.

I've got Patreon, Paypal and Bitcoin setup already: https://www.brow.sh/donate/

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

#164
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…

actually one problem you have here, and you're probably realizing from the responses, is a problem I had with a personal project that could be used to build lots of things that people wanted, but in itself was not a thing people want. In order to monetize you need to build one of the things people want, but in doing so you put focus into one area and stop improving the generic base of everything, as well as not produ…

damn, yes, that's indeed perceptive

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

#165
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…

I could see this being part of a lightweight browser UI testing framework. There's already ways to drive a headless UI (Selenium, puppeteer), but they require automation testers to interact with page elements via the "normal" DOM which can be quite painful in terms of creating automation tests - DSLs to drive DOM automation are necessarily huge. I could envision browser automation via browsh using a very small DSL e.…

I've thought of that too. The trouble is that Browsh's text renderer is more of a science than an art. It's quite hard to actually get a guarantee of the same text twice, which is a pretty important condition of testing.

But yes, I'd love for Browsh to be used in such a way!

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

#166
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…

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 :)

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

#167

> 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 .

I was wondering about this. If everything goes through an already installed browser, then what is the advantage that browsh has over a minimalistic fork of Firefox with e.g., lower bandwith features?

The point is it works without graphics so you can use it over ssh, for example.

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

#168
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…

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…

I've thought about this too, because https://text.brow.sh certainly does make scraping websites easy, you just need to `curl` and `grep`. But the trouble is, as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Browsh's text renderer is more of an art than a science, it doesn't guarantee consistent results for every render. Whereas of course downloading HTML and using something like Beautiful Soup does give a much better guarantee of consistency.

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

#169
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Firefox is open source, in the same vein as this project? Just a guess.

Chromium is also open source

He said Chrome, though. Or is there no headless Chrome but only Chromium? Can't say I've ever heard of headless Chrome, though, so I guess that's why I'm being downvoted.

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

#170
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use ublock and umatrix addons for Firefox, they're free and available on mobile too.

I am very familiar with uBlock and such. I have a local DNS at home which blocks a lot of stuff for the whole family at home without using plugin-blockers. My wife don’t know a life with ads and is often surprised when visiting friends: “what a nightmare of distraction” What I mean is an app that connects to an instance (vm, server) a brow.sh. I would like to install this in a lxc container and connect to it from my…

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!

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