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Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

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Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#111

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

jadbox wrote: post #108
slowenough wrote: post #14

Earlier 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.

The entire point of this project is to bypass the browser rendering engine locally and risk exposing all of its bugs, zero days, vulnerabilities, tracking etc. If you would be just copying HTML, that would give a regular old proxy server. This project is about security, not just hiding the ip address.

> it would be far more efficient than sending back a pixel video stream

Yes it would also deliver back exactly all the vulnerabilities to you that this project was specifically made for protecting against... Are you sure you have read its description? The whole point is to do dumb pixels that can't be exploited.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#112

Post by wdrw »

A while ago I wrote something very similar - https://fasterbadger.com - see discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679464 - based on PhantomJS - didn't put nearly as much work into it though, it's still very much in prototype stage - the goal was different though, not so much for privacy but for browsing JS- and CSS-heavy sites (e.g. most news sites) on legacy devices/phones, especially where bandwidth is at a premium.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#113

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

slowenough wrote: post #70
krzkaczor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with https://mightyapp.com/ it looks like there are people working on something very similar but closed source & VC backed. Thoughts?

Yes! I requested an invite and reached out to Suhail on Twitter (I actually interviewed at Mixpanel ~ 18 months ago before I knew anything about MP or MA) about a technical question about MA that I got to thinking about from my experience building BG but didn't hear back from them. Mixpanel was a cool interview. I remember the question was about data structure for a rank system (it was a heap). The office in SF is be…

> I definitely think the future is mreo 'app virtualization'

Why would you think that? Where do you see this trend? Their app looks incredibly stupid to me and it is hard to imagine any large number of people that would use it.

Your project aims to provide security, which is an interesting goal, that I think security-conscious people would want to use.

But to virtualize a browser... for performance? For browser apps (which are already "virtualized" desktop apps, of sorts), trading off enormous amounts of bandwidth, for what, cheap RAM sticks that are getting cheaper by the month and faster SSDs for quick swap? For what usage case? That one guy who happens to have a chromebook but needs to run 100 tabs actively? You could just run "unload tab" extension already... Or like just have a desktop that you VNC into... Which all of the people that need this have been doing for decades...

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#114

Post by ausjke »

Just had a quick check, some web page will fail the click event(mouse click won't do anything).

on the other hand I have been using novnc to do similar things for my own testing purposes(running chrome inside chrome remotely), it worked very well for me so far.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#115

Post by rinchik »

Just tried the demo on your website and it seems to be quite slow and unresponsive. If this a load issue?

Also it gives me a feeling that I'm not in control of what's happening on the screen. Could you please let me know how is this solution better (or more secure) than using remote desktop with disposable VMs?

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#116

Post by Legogris »

Great work, and so great of you to open-source this - I really hope you keep it that way!

Would be really cool to set this up and set the server up to do some proxy-hopping to make IP tracking more difficult as well, regardless of client device and when roaming.. While I'd be more leaning towards self-hosting, if you set this up as a subscription service, your users will also benefit from sharing the same pool of IPs (though I imagine you'd also face issues with getting flagged/blacklisted/CAPTCHAd a lot through abusers and bots, that will be significant work to polise if you go that route).

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#117

Post by throwaway444912 »

This makes little sense, it doesn't protect you from exploits, they just run on the cloud instead.

If an attacker has a browser exploit, they can still..

- read all your email

- log all your passwords

- wait for you to login to online banking and transfer all the money.

You also have to worry about the host being compromised, or the operator logging your activity, etc.

If this is something you really want for some reason, why not just RDP/VNC/Chrome Remote Desktop back to your office/home network.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#118

Post by slowenough »

Legogris wrote: post #116

Great work, and so great of you to open-source this - I really hope you keep it that way! Would be really cool to set this up and set the server up to do some proxy-hopping to make IP tracking more difficult as well, regardless of client device and when roaming.. While I'd be more leaning towards self-hosting, if you set this up as a subscription service, your users will also benefit from sharing the same pool of IPs…

Thank you for this!

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#119

Post by slowenough »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #111
jadbox wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The entire point of this project is to bypass the browser rendering engine locally and risk exposing all of its bugs, zero days, vulnerabilities, tracking etc. If you would be just copying HTML, that would give a regular old proxy server. This project is about security, not just hiding the ip address. > it would be far more efficient than sending back a pixel video stream Yes it would also deliver back exactly all th…

Thank you for this! You really explained that well and clearly.

Re: Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

#120

Post by cryptozeus »

slowenough wrote: post #56
cryptozeus wrote: post #54

On ios safari, browergap is unusable. Screen is totally pixelated after hitting the search button.

Thanks a lot for your time on this report, and I'm really sorry about that! It sounds like the screen is pixelated and unusable. That must be very annoying! I don't have an iPhone next to me right now, and I have not tested in Safari for about a week. Would you mind sharing a screenshot? I know that because iOS Safari does not support WebP, I'm just using JPEGs which means the quality is worse there. As a short term…

Give me your email, i will send the screenshot of what I see. Any random emIl is fine.
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