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Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser

brow.sh

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Re: Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser

#81

Post by nix23 »

keithwinstein wrote: post #71
tombh wrote: post #68

Dearest fellow terminal lovers, The creator of Browsh here. I have such mixed feelings about seeing Browsh here again. I poured soooo much geeky passion into it, but I've just not had the opportunity to take it to the next step since its initial rise to stardom. There have been a couple of contributors recently and I haven't even been able to get the CI to run because I've lost The Knowledge. I even had to take the d…

Heya, we (Mosh) are fans of Browsh and are happy to talk if we can be helpful! It's definitely doable to expose (and directly link with) the Mosh networking and terminal libraries if you're unhappy depending on the executables. You're not wrong that our release cadence has also fallen off a cliff, probably for similar reasons to you (this has been a tough year for our active maintainer). Honestly I think of Mosh as m…

>we (Mosh)

HA, when i read "UDP" mosh instantly came to my mind ;)

BTW: Thank you very much for mosh, working in trains on a shell is now perfectly fine

Re: Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser

#82

Post by [deleted] »

Zhyl wrote: post #18

If people are looking for an actual modern take on text based browsing, I would refer them to the work of Igor Chubin. curl https://v2.wttr.in/London curl https://cheat.sh/rsync With a supported terminal: curl https://v3.wttr.in And also: https://github.com/chubin/awesome-console-services

[deleted]

Re: Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser

#83

Post by C19is20 »

freedomben wrote: post #33

Yes it's super slow, but many of the criticisms are missing the point. This enables browsing over SSH when you have low bandwidth. The heavy internetting is done on the remote machine (like a cloud VM for example) using blazing fast data center internet. A personal example may explain why I love this. For several years I lived in rural Alaska where the fastest internet one could buy was $120 a month (I think) and a b…

'...roaming abilities': can you explain? As a Europeon, 'roaming' is travelling to a different country and using a foreign network, but paying our home provider. Do the US states consider is Colorado different to California? I always understood 'not different', and I may have misunderstood a tech element.

Re: Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser

#84

Post by damagednoob »

freedomben wrote: post #33

Yes it's super slow, but many of the criticisms are missing the point. This enables browsing over SSH when you have low bandwidth. The heavy internetting is done on the remote machine (like a cloud VM for example) using blazing fast data center internet. A personal example may explain why I love this. For several years I lived in rural Alaska where the fastest internet one could buy was $120 a month (I think) and a b…

> In related news, when people talk about the merits of developing with just Vim vs. an IDE, I also recount the same story.

I've been in similar situations and while I've honestly tried to give Vim a go, there just seemed like to much setup and configuration so I went back to an IDE. In my case sshfs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFS) was the lifesaver. Code locally, execute remotely. 99% of the time, I'd finish making a code change in the IDE and by the time I'd switched to the terminal on the remote server, it had already sync'ed.

Re: Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser

#85

Post by dnet »

C19is20 wrote: post #83
freedomben wrote: post #33

Yes it's super slow, but many of the criticisms are missing the point. This enables browsing over SSH when you have low bandwidth. The heavy internetting is done on the remote machine (like a cloud VM for example) using blazing fast data center internet. A personal example may explain why I love this. For several years I lived in rural Alaska where the fastest internet one could buy was $120 a month (I think) and a b…

'...roaming abilities': can you explain? As a Europeon, 'roaming' is travelling to a different country and using a foreign network, but paying our home provider. Do the US states consider is Colorado different to California? I always understood 'not different', and I may have misunderstood a tech element.

Regular SSH won't work if your IP address changes since it uses TCP where sessions are tied to (IP address, port) tuples. However mosh uses UDP and its own session management scheme, so you can "roam" between IP addresses and your session will stay alive, you can continue typing and will receive screen updates as if nothing has happened.

Re: Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser

#86

Post by detaro »

C19is20 wrote: post #83
freedomben wrote: post #33

Yes it's super slow, but many of the criticisms are missing the point. This enables browsing over SSH when you have low bandwidth. The heavy internetting is done on the remote machine (like a cloud VM for example) using blazing fast data center internet. A personal example may explain why I love this. For several years I lived in rural Alaska where the fastest internet one could buy was $120 a month (I think) and a b…

'...roaming abilities': can you explain? As a Europeon, 'roaming' is travelling to a different country and using a foreign network, but paying our home provider. Do the US states consider is Colorado different to California? I always understood 'not different', and I may have misunderstood a tech element.

"roaming" as a technical term just refers to any case where you move between networks and something maintains a connection. mobile phone network roaming is just one case of that, but e.g. moving to a different WLAN access point is the same. In the case of mosh, you can change your IP but it will still continue the existing session with the server (unlike SSH, which will fail the connection)

Re: Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser

#88

Post by mcky »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #74

I've often thought that ad blockers get it all wrong, we shouldn't be identifying the ads to block them, we should be identifying the desired content and serving it up to the exclusion of everything else. The run-a-server-elsewhere-and-connect model of Brow.sh seems ideal for building something that did that: - render the page server side - check for crowd-sourced filters - apply them - pass page to user I'd happy ma…

This is almost exactly what I've had in the back of my mind for years now.

I've been trying to prototype a browser with the aim of extracting semantic content from webpages and presenting them in a uniform manner (with the user able to choose/modify the templates). I try to explain it to less technical people as a "permanent safari reader mode for all types of web content - articles, ecommerce pages, recipes etc".

The current model is similar to brow.sh (or opera's vpn etc), the browser makes the request via the server, which extracts the content and serves back the minimal representation. The client then has its own templates saved meaning all layout happens client side and so only the content has to go over the wire.

The user then has control over how they view the content, all images are forced to be lazy loaded (with lqip previews currently) and I'm interested in how to take it further such as extracting the structure of a website navigation and always presenting it in a uniform fashion.

My prototype kinda works for browsing hn/reddit/lobsters and articles and is pretty snappy but content extraction is the hard part that's kept me from starting for a long time.

I've always held off on sharing this because 1) I didn't have a hn account (can't get sucked into an argument about javascript if you can't comment) 2) I was never sure how to present the idea and how exactly to frame it compared to reader mode, adblockers, AMP, Brave, surfing without JS and a ton of different alternatives

If anyones interested I'd love to discuss it and maybe get my prototype live somewhere if there's interest (email address in my about)

Re: Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser

#89

Post by mnw21cam »

Jenda_ wrote: post #63
freedomben wrote: post #33

Yes it's super slow, but many of the criticisms are missing the point. This enables browsing over SSH when you have low bandwidth. The heavy internetting is done on the remote machine (like a cloud VM for example) using blazing fast data center internet. A personal example may explain why I love this. For several years I lived in rural Alaska where the fastest internet one could buy was $120 a month (I think) and a b…

> This enables browsing over SSH when you have low bandwidth. Their demo is down now, but I have tried it in 2018 and unfortunately it was pretty bandwidth-heavy (about 100 kB/s while displaying a static webpage): it was permanently refreshing the entire terminal contents. Maybe they have fixed it since then, or it will be better with Mosh (as they suggest on their homepage). I think that rendering server-side and tr…

> I think that rendering server-side and transferring text as simple text blocks and images as heavily compressed HEIF/WebP in a special graphics client...

That is almost achieved when you run a real web browser inside VNC, and connect to it using a VNC client that does the appropriate compression. (Tunnelled through ssh, obviously.)

Re: Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser

#90

Post by mcky »

fathead_glacier wrote: post #8
soheil wrote: post #7

It seems to be incredibly slow which kind of defeats the purpose of having a text-based browser to begin with. I'm not sure, but it looks like it's taking the output of a headless Firefox and turning it into ascii. If that's the case I'd rather stick with something like Lynx, etc.

The point is when you have a connection with limited bandwidth. In such cases you can host browsh in the cloud and connect to it with ssh/mosh. You get a much better experience than text based browsers at a limited bandwidth. It's great for such cases - I use it when hiking / working away from good internet.

I run into this a lot travelling in places with bad internet and hiking. I just want to check a route or some place and travel bloggers and their bloated ad-riddled popup-covered sites take forever to load.

I mentioned in another thread an alternative browser I've been prototyping to solve this problem. I'd love if you could tell me more about what you need from something like this. All my prototyping so far has been on desktop but the idea in my head has always been for a mobile app since that's often all I have when travelling, but there's no reason for it not to work on desktop too.

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