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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

#211

Post by vinchuco »

tombh wrote: post #27
max_likelihood wrote: post #21

Very cool! I find the pixelated images to be quite charming. One thing I noticed, when I go to https://text.brow.sh it reads: `Welcome to the Browsh plain text client. You can use it by appending URLs like this; https://html.brow.sh/https://www.brow.sh` . Should it be ` https://text.brow.sh/https://www.brow.sh` instead?

Thanks. Yes it's like the retro 8-bit style, it has a certain charm I agree. Damn, I can't believe I missed that! I fixed it in the code and will deploy soon with some other fixes.

Note your donate link https://html.brow.sh/https://www.brow.sh/donate/ 'broke' the QR code. Amazing work!

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

#212

Post by jacquesm »

Mind blown how accurate this is, I've sent you some BTC as token of appreciation even though I do not have any application for what you've built right now. A lot of work has gone into this and it shows.

edit: it's so good that I got confused about which window I was looking at and tried to click links with the mouse :)

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

#213

Post by jacquesm »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #114
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…

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web 1995-2005 or thereabout will be the best documented period of humanity and it is saddening to see how payload has been replaced by cruft to the point that we might as well have remote PDF viewers.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

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

#215

Post by josh921 »

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…

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 want to pay you to make it work better.

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

#216

Post by Tehnix »

pseingatl wrote: post #206

The MacOS "binary" version: --isn't a disk image --isn't an app --isn't source code So what is it?

An executable? Haven’t had a chance to check it myself yet, but that’d probably mean you have to chmod +x it, and the run it in a terminal.

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

#217

Post by C4stor »

jacquesm wrote: post #210
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is typical for infrastructure and foundation libraries. Nobody made money on jpeg, but jpeg powered entire industries.

While your point stands, you may be interested to know that a company actually successfully sold a patent for jpeg at some point, and made about $100M doing so. So I wouldn't say nobody made money on jpeg !

But it's also interesting for the OP, maybe there's something patentable in there ?

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

#220

Post by jacquesm »

C4stor wrote: post #217
jacquesm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is typical for infrastructure and foundation libraries. Nobody made money on jpeg, but jpeg powered entire industries.

While your point stands, you may be interested to know that a company actually successfully sold a patent for jpeg at some point, and made about $100M doing so. So I wouldn't say nobody made money on jpeg ! But it's also interesting for the OP, maybe there's something patentable in there ?

If you're referring to Forgent: they were patent trolls and their patent was invalidated due to prior art. Unfortunately not before a bunch of companies paid up.

Fraunhofer is a better example of an institute that made good money on tech patents with merit, as well as 3M and lots of other tech companies.

But as a rule these things are hard to monetize and while I'm not happy that it will be hard to monetize the work that went into this particular project at the same time I think it is good that patents are most likely a closed avenue.

Patents are - in my opinion - a net negative and the sooner they are abolished the better.

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