I just want to let everyone know there's also a version for Asia-pacific (in a HK Google datacenter) that will probably be faster if you're not in a US timezone.
Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced
101–110 of 159 posts
Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced
#102I have a few questions.
Does it update the whole screen each time something is changed on the page?
How have you got rid of Google captcha? I didn't get any while I was using it.
Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced
#103Does this run on raspberry pi? E.g. could i get a rpi4 (which seems powerful enough), connect it to my router and install this on it?
It should.
If you do this, please post an issue or PR on the REPO. I'd love to include something cool like this in a "built with BG" section.
Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I used to do was launch a browser in an Xvnc or RDP session in a VM somewhere. Then do all my browsing from there. Later, I worked somewhere where RDP was blocked so I started using Guacamole (RDP/VNC over websocket). What this author is providing is a similar and all-in-one npm solution for the above. Also has use-cases outside of secure runtime environments...
Thank you for your explanations here, you really get this category! I'm sorry but do you mind if I ask what's your background? I'd like to ask for your advice, I'm at cris@dosycorp.com .... Would you be uninterested in discussing over email?
Hey Cris! I saw your email in another thread and I was gonna reach out but for different reasons! My background is software dev with an emphasis on systems infrastructure and release management. I’ve worked enterprise and startups and my niche right now is M&A transitions. Look out for my email later today!
Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remote file viewer is a good idea. The hard part is convincing users to a workflow where they can't save their files, only view or print them. There are tons of software with tons of proprietary file formats. One day you'll have to give up and allow downloading. But I see a certain segment of small business users who have everything cloud-based, where this might take off.
I agree that downloads are important, so I'm committed to integrating with org's existing file/firewall policies and secure web gateways. I'm interested in what you said. Would it be a terrible idea for you to tell me some more about this certain segment of small business users?
I've seen a couple of them during my consulting gigs. They don't want to own any infrastructure and don't want to keep IT staff to maintain it. They indeed use G Suite, Office 365 and cloud varieties of line-of-business apps: order processing, inventory, accounting etc. If an app doesn't have a suitable cloud alternative, it's moved to VPS and accessed via RemoteApp (at this point you apparently get some IT guy).
They keep client PCs as "thin" (read "cheap") as possible. They don't have a "SWG" or "file/firewall policies" or anyone who can implement and enforce it. It's just stock desktop AV software perhaps with some initial tuning. And this resource-hungry beast is there only to scan incoming files for the ransomware-of-the-day, either downloaded from the Internet or copied from USB thumb drives. If they could deny users from downloading anything, disable thumb drives and drop AV entirely, they'd be much happier, especially that poor IT guy.
Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll tell you the value of this software. I can build software for non prod environments and allow my developers/testers access. for instance, with wordpress, domains are hardcoded into the database leaving you with risky sed commands against mysqldumps. With this I can launch wordpress into its own environment where www.foobar.com resolves but I can run all dev code there. I currently use a proxy and have instructio…
Have you tried using this? When I said > sacrifice the ability to interact with text, resolution, color accuracy, frame rate, etc. it’s very much an understatement... Pretty sure your devs/testers won’t appreciate the experience. Frontend devs in particular can’t possibly work with this. I fail to see why it’s hard for you to spin up (possibly gated) dev/staging instances; certainly much easier and much less resource…
Sorry about the typo (in my comment below)! I couldn't edit it past the edit horizon. I meant,
> Genuinely curious: who's your customer base?
Anyway, thank you so much for being interested in this product, especially for helping make the space for me to speak about the type of customer, the risks they face, and their reasons for adopting BrowserGap. I really appreciate your time on this!
Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll tell you the value of this software. I can build software for non prod environments and allow my developers/testers access. for instance, with wordpress, domains are hardcoded into the database leaving you with risky sed commands against mysqldumps. With this I can launch wordpress into its own environment where www.foobar.com resolves but I can run all dev code there. I currently use a proxy and have instructio…
Have you tried using this? When I said > sacrifice the ability to interact with text, resolution, color accuracy, frame rate, etc. it’s very much an understatement... Pretty sure your devs/testers won’t appreciate the experience. Frontend devs in particular can’t possibly work with this. I fail to see why it’s hard for you to spin up (possibly gated) dev/staging instances; certainly much easier and much less resource…
At my 30 second glance I saw both problems and solutions with using it. But if didn’t use software based on problems, we wouldn’t get anywhere :) It’s open source so my mind is leaning toward crack it open and fix the shortcomings for the use case
Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, BrowserGap is a remote browser isolation product. RBI means accessing the public internet through a browser that runs in the cloud, rather than through a browser that runs on your device. This helps protect you from attacks on the web.
And, if you're interested, read on for more detail. It works by providing a thin client over the web that you connect your regular browser to. The thin client provides an interface to a remote browser that you interact with the browser the public internet. This is significant because the internet is a cesspool of attacks. Malware, ransomware, virii, tracking, exploited PDFs, ways to deliver device zero days over the…
Question: why have the protocol based on pixels when you could use vanilla css and html? Like SSR, you could render the page with js remotely and capture the live html/css render to display. Of course, this process would be tricky as you'd also have to look for iframes and also generate bake out its render too. While much more complex, it would be far more efficient than sending back a pixel video stream.
Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried using this? When I said > sacrifice the ability to interact with text, resolution, color accuracy, frame rate, etc. it’s very much an understatement... Pretty sure your devs/testers won’t appreciate the experience. Frontend devs in particular can’t possibly work with this. I fail to see why it’s hard for you to spin up (possibly gated) dev/staging instances; certainly much easier and much less resource…
> genifnly curious: who's your customer base? Customer base is people and organizations who are having problems with malware and cyber attacks. > Have you tried using this? When I said > sacrifice the ability to interact with text, resolution, color accuracy, frame rate, etc. > it’s very much an understatement... Pretty sure your devs/testers won’t appreciate the experience. Frontend devs in particular can’t possibly…
Appreciate the detailed response. Over the past few years I've seen a couple of similar remote browser services and was curious who actually need it, glad you shared firsthand knowledge.
Now I can see that while this would probably be an overkill security-conscious individuals, it might make sense for organizations because there are always employees who can be easily tricked into clicking anything. I do wonder whether it's more effective and productive to instead enforce host-based blocking + browser-level content blocking + lightweight virtualization (like Windows Sandbox? Not sure how well it works since I'm a Mac user for the most part), but I'm in no position to evaluate for organizations.
Having checked Symantec's website, they seem to advocate falling back to a remote browser when the site is potentially risky, which sounds reasonable.
> then for clients with browsers that support WebP (chrome) I switch on WebP since the quality increase is a LOT
Yeah, I first tried the service on my iPad Pro, image quality was terrible. I have since tried it again in desktop Chrome and it's definitely passable. That's unfortunate.
Anyway, I'm probably not in the target market, but best of luck to your business.
Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, if you're interested, read on for more detail. It works by providing a thin client over the web that you connect your regular browser to. The thin client provides an interface to a remote browser that you interact with the browser the public internet. This is significant because the internet is a cesspool of attacks. Malware, ransomware, virii, tracking, exploited PDFs, ways to deliver device zero days over the…
Question: why have the protocol based on pixels when you could use vanilla css and html? Like SSR, you could render the page with js remotely and capture the live html/css render to display. Of course, this process would be tricky as you'd also have to look for iframes and also generate bake out its render too. While much more complex, it would be far more efficient than sending back a pixel video stream.
It's too complicated. The complexity in the code leads to more opportunities for bugs and exploits and more maintenance cost. Also it breaks the isolation model since you can do all sorts of crazy exploits just with HTML and CSS (animation event listeners for XSS etc).
I investigated this path after PoCing the original (you can see the code in a directory plugins/appminifier and public/voodoo/src/plugins/appminifer, I think) but there's all sorts of interaction issues that arise when you attempt to filter the HTML in this way.
Efficient in terms of what? Bandwidth, from a certain point of view but you lose the "source of absolute truth" that a screenshot is, and at the cost of interaction quirks. Also, not necessarily CPU efficient, as you have to do a lot of bookkeeping to transmit events to the right places and keep the local tree in sync with the remote tree.
The main reason I avoided it was the security holes introduced by breaking the strict isolation model of pixels, and the complexity.
You're welcome to fork and improve on the work begun in appminifier! If you go down that path, just know, there be dragons, and good luck!