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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

#171

Post by tombh »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #149
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…

if it was pluggable into other browsers, or other browser's extensions, then charge a small fee for that kind of usage.

I've had the idea to make a webextension that transparently proxies all top-level URL bar requests to html.brow.sh, that way you can click on links in other applications that open in your browser and instantly get the Browsh version. I think it could a fantastic resource for those in the world that have slow and/or expensive internet.

First though I really need to improve html.brow.sh

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

#172

Post by tombh »

mamcx wrote: post #99
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…

Well stay chargin for it. Put a button and give a dedicated connection for people that pay?

For sure that's definitely an option, for both the SSH service and the html.brow.sh service. As people get to learn about Browsh let's see if there are any takers.

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

#173

Post by tombh »

nemild wrote: post #115
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…

Re: financial support, have you seen Nadia Eghbal's Lemonade Stand for a whole set of ideas: A handy guide to financial support for open source. https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand

Fantastic resource, thanks

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

#174

Post by bryanrasmussen »

tombh wrote: post #171
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it was pluggable into other browsers, or other browser's extensions, then charge a small fee for that kind of usage.

I've had the idea to make a webextension that transparently proxies all top-level URL bar requests to html.brow.sh, that way you can click on links in other applications that open in your browser and instantly get the Browsh version. I think it could a fantastic resource for those in the world that have slow and/or expensive internet. First though I really need to improve html.brow.sh

I wonder if it would be a benefit for EU people who just want to read the site and not get a modal that tells them if they don't accept privacy invasions you can't read the page.

I'm getting tired of writing down GDPR violations to report.

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

#175

Post by tombh »

mattl wrote: post #137
tombh wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you're right, it's unfair to lump elinks and lynx together. It's before Browsh I would use elinks all the time as it seemed the most modern. Surely though just the sheer fact of CSS's `hidden` declaration has to be taken into account by any browser, text-based nor not? I've came to the conclusion that there just simply isn't a subset of modern web standards that you can adhere to and still use the web today. Our…

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.

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

#176

Post by easytiger »

noobermin wrote: post #93
azernik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But it doesn't work without X, a common use case for lynx/links/w3m

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

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

#177

Post by tombh »

Grue3 wrote: post #153

Sadly it doesn't seem like it can render even basic HTML forms, which other text browsers can do. Otherwise it'd be very useful. [1] https://html.brow.sh/https://ichi.moe/

The html.brow.sh service is quite far behind the terminal client in terms of features. Besides there's big hurdles over privacy if html.brow.sh starts letting users log into sites.

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

#178

Post by tombh »

jhanschoo wrote: post #119

Seeing as images are so pixelated as to be near-indistiguishable, I think it would be nice for browsh to have a status line where it shows accessibility metadata (e.g. alt="" attributes) of whatever element is currently in focus. It might also be nice to have a mode where images are just replaced by filled boxes that are more visually distinguished from the surrounding content.

That's a great idea about the `alt` metadata, thank you.

Have you got an example URL for a page that would benefit from those filled boxes you mention?

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

#179

Post by tombh »

peatmoss wrote: post #102
tombh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by access to machines? Like SSH access? Do you think such a service would be significantly different to an email service in terms of privacy concerns?

Yes, I do think it’s pretty different. If you weren’t the fine upstanding person you are, you’d have all the web traffic of users at your disposal: banking, secure interactions with healthcare providers, credentials to Hacker News, the whole nine yards. With access to my email, you could probably reset a handful of my passwords to various services that don’t support dual factor auth, and you could probably discover w…

Now that you describe it, yes indeed I can see the problems. I can't think of any other precedent, as most other proxies are least protected by HTTPS, wheres a Browsh service is literally reading every character on a page in plain text! So there's need to be a great deal of trust. I wonder if it's just too much to ask of people, especially where money is involved.

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

#180

Post by tombh »

e12e wrote: post #155
peatmoss wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I do think it’s pretty different. If you weren’t the fine upstanding person you are, you’d have all the web traffic of users at your disposal: banking, secure interactions with healthcare providers, credentials to Hacker News, the whole nine yards. With access to my email, you could probably reset a handful of my passwords to various services that don’t support dual factor auth, and you could probably discover w…

It should be quite doable to spin up a container/VM on demand. I'd probably look at lxd/lxc or bsd jails for this (both with zfs for storage) - or if there now are any real ways to run containers under hw virtualization - maybe that. Maybe something like: https://github.com/rkt/rkt/blob/master/Documentation/running... for VM backed containers - but I'm not sure if it's considered stable and/or secure.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm already using Kubernetes/Docker for the `ssh brow.sh` service. What advantages would your approach have?
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