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

brow.sh

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

#221
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You absolutely could, Opera browser was doing something (I think they proxied images and similar files) before it gets to someone's screen. If you can compress large images (and you'd have to know they're images cause you gotta render them right?) in such a way that they're not visually distorted it would be worth paying for.

The harder thing is trust, trusting you to not change any images. On the other hand that'd make for a fun VPN service for general browsing (but again then it comes back to trust) but if you target it as a browser plugin bundled VPN service that saves on bandwidth you could hit more of an audience and use that income to fund Browsh. I figure you dont want to get too far outside of that scope though (development wise) since it's a lot more work.

I also like the other ideas of using some of the Browsh capabilities to scrape the web, maybe as a paid API, sure you can write a script to do that, but if you can curl / postman an API that does it for you and returns what you need, then why wouldn't you? Trick is can an API be done just perfectly enough? How do you tell it to give you whatever part of the screen with whatever requirements? It could sound simple but get complicated quickly enough. If it's too complex maybe a compression VPN is a better target.

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

#223

$ ssh brow.sh All of Browsh's servers are currently busy. Please try again soon. Connection to brow.sh closed. Seems like a cool way to do a demo for something that's a bit painful to install on macOS (would love to see $ brew install browsh). I'll have to give it another look once the HN effect has died down.

In my case it generated SIGSEGV and the "Connection to brow.sh" was closed.

The more interesting that my gnome-terminal still receives/prints some codes. When I hit enter, it tries to execute them!

https://ibb.co/buhqE8 and (ENTER) https://ibb.co/itFz7T

Does anyone of you know the mechanism behind it?

EDIT: Does anyone of you know how to use it to type into terminal "sudo su -"?

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

#225
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.

[deleted]

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

#226
post #168

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…

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 guarante…

I don’t think that lack of consistency should stop you though. Ok maybe it wouldn’t be suitable for testing things but there are other uses for a headless browser

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

#227
post #85

What's with the Virus warning with the windows binary? Comes up with BrowserModifier Win32/Unwaders.B!ml detected.

This is related to: https://html.brow.sh/https://chocolatkey.com/blog/mathletics... Do you still get the warning with the latest v1.2.3? https://www.brow.sh/downloads/

Windows Defender says:

Trojan:Win32/Fuery.B!cl | Severe

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

#228
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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.

Keep up the good work!

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

#230
post #75
post #71

how does it know how to convert a webpage to a ascii?

Ha, that's a very long story. The gist though is that some custom CSS forces a given webpage into a strict, monospaced, mono-sized grid. Then JS queries DOM text nodes for their contents and precise positions. Then using the standard rules of text flow the exact position of every character can be fairly reliably derived.

that's beautiful, where can we find this cool CSS file?
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