Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: A remote browser product, open-sourced

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 159 posts

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

#141

Post by slowenough »

Hitton wrote: post #140

Surprisingly usable, considering it's on the other side of the globe. Personally I don't see myself having a use for it, but I'm sure it could find its users. Two thing I noticed. You have to enter address including "http(s)" to avoid searching it in DDG. And more annoyingly I couldn't select text on web page.

Thanks for saying that!

As for text selection, the best I have so far is

right click to open context menu

select "Copy text from here"

And you should get a box pop up with text you can select. :)

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

#143

Post by slowenough »

jek_rock wrote: post #102

I 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.

Yes, it listens for LayerTree.layerPainted events, and queues a screenshot on that. It also queues screenshots on other things, such as on "clicks", "scrolls" and a few other interactions.

After Screenshots are queued, they're throttled to a low framerate, and then each frame is compared with the last sent, before it is sent to the client, and dropped if there's no change.

I got rid of CAPTCHA by changing the search provider to DDG.

Thank you for your comments, I really appreciate it! :)

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

#144

Post by westi »

slowenough wrote: post #2

This represents over 1 year of work. Why am I open sourcing this? I don't see any other RBI / CBII vendor open sourcing their platform and in the security industry "closed source" can create issues. But what about business defensibility? I agree. Open sourcing removes the trade secret aspect that could make a defensible business. At the same time, a determined hacker would already have my source code. A hacked "free…

This is pretty cool.

It might be work stopping the browser 'loading' itself inception style with some kind of blacklisting of loadable urls - I assume you already have something to protect against SSRF type attacks on the platform itself.

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

#145

Post by gfodor »

slowenough wrote: post #125
gfodor wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did an experiment a while ago with streaming chrome to twitch from a gpu-enabled ec2 node and it worked quite well. Was able to stream a webgl experience at 60hz.

That's good to know, thank you. What made you do that? Would it be too annoying to share some more about it?

We have a webgl app (hubs.mozilla.com) we wanted to determine the viability of doing cloud streaming of remotely.

here's some personal notes from this. i didn't work on containerization, just raw VM setup. had to get x11 up and running and then set ffmpeg up for hardware streaming.

https://gist.github.com/gfodor/3c88700ee81a10e01c783019b8a64...

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

#146

Post by kpsychwave »

Interested to hear about professional use cases for this kind of tool. I am working on a cloud-based sandbox browser very similar to the OP here: https://www.sandboxbrowser.com/

My target audience is software developers, QA engineers, and Ops people who want a predictable isolated browser environment for doing various forms of testing / hacking.

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

#147

Post by slowenough »

slowenough wrote: post #123
o-__-o wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Thanks, I'll be looking out for it!

You might need to reach out at cris@dosyago.com I think the G Suite email (dosycorp) is dropping mails.

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

#148

Post by slowenough »

Hey HN, thanks for all the love on this, and for helping me think about other use cases for and how to communicate about this product. I really appreciate this!

Also, I noticed I spent a lot of time maintaining the demo instances (resizing). In a real deployment the number of users per machine is pretty much static, but here I've had to deal with scaling and spikes.

It occurred to me today that I could probably put the free demos behind a load balancer (smaller basic machines, and scale them up or down), so that I don't have to manually resize the instance.

I've taken down the two demo sites (free & hk) for now, while I work on the load balancer setup. Should be back up in a couple hours.

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

#149

Post by z3t4 »

slowenough wrote: post #142
z3t4 wrote: post #137

So is this using the canvas? What about accessability?

That's a great point, and something I have not considered. It's a big oversight, I'm sorry about that. Let me think about it. There must be a way to do this.

For screen readers you could run it server side. Then stream audio/video to the client. Although I dont think this is the best sution to the problem. A better solution would be to run the browser with a hardware abstraction layer, like a virtual machine.

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

#150

Post by slowenough »

slowenough wrote: post #148

Hey HN, thanks for all the love on this, and for helping me think about other use cases for and how to communicate about this product. I really appreciate this! Also, I noticed I spent a lot of time maintaining the demo instances (resizing). In a real deployment the number of users per machine is pretty much static, but here I've had to deal with scaling and spikes. It occurred to me today that I could probably put t…

Edit: Servers are back up

I moved from a single massive instance to a target pool behind a load balancer with health checks based on if there's available queue.

https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz

https://hk.cloudbrowser.xyz

I have not worked out how to geographically load balance both of those from a single domain based on which you are closest too, but I want to see if these new smaller instances in load balanced target group pools can scale to take the load like a larger instance.

Post reply on HN