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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

#61

Post by samatman »

trungdq88 wrote: post #59
fathead_glacier wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you, I just learned about Mosh and it's absolutely awesome! I have to switch VPN regularly in my job and it's a real pain in the ass working with multiple ongoing ssh sessions. No more!

Mosh has been making remote sessions bearable for years, and I'm grateful, but I made the switch to Eternal Terminal recently and it's better:

https://eternalterminal.dev

The native scroll support and tmux-aware behavior are both pretty slick.

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

#62

Post by jake_morrison »

Back in the 90s I developed a new HR-related web application for a customer in China. Then we found out that they still had a significant number of users on serial terminals, basically a VT-100 with support for Chinese characters.

So I made the app work with Lynx text mode browser. Magic getting the Internet on a serial terminal.

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

#63

Post by Jenda_ »

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 transferring text as simple text blocks and images as heavily compressed HEIF/WebP in a special graphics client (or even a standard web browser) would be better. I was using something called Ziproxy over GPRS back in 2009 -- it was compressing HTML/CSS on the fly and recompressing images to JPEG with terrible quality.

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

#65

Post by vonwoodson »

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…

Agreed. I wish that modern web browsers would just implement some of these text only/low bandwidth settings.

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

#66

Post by aidenn0 »

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…

I suspect an h265 compressed stream of a browser would be lower bandwidth than this, particularly for image heavy pages

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

#68

Post by tombh »

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 demo services down `ssh brow.sh` and https://html.brow.sh just because there was a bug and I couldn't remember how everything worked.

The plan for the next step is to write a dedicated text-based UDP protocol, maybe with some video compression tricks, so there's no dependency on Mosh then (whose development also seems to have stalled BTW). That way the client will be extremely lightweight, and work in either a normal browser or a tiny CLI application.

As others have faithfully recounted, the entire raison d'etre of Browsh is to fight against the increasing bloat (and bandwidth costs) of the web. I travel a lot outside the Western world and am often surprised just how many MBs I need to consume the wealth of text on the internet.

I hope the next time Browsh arrives on the frontpage is because of a new version.

Thanks, Tom

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

#69

Post by jiggunjer »

aidenn0 wrote: post #66
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…

I suspect an h265 compressed stream of a browser would be lower bandwidth than this, particularly for image heavy pages

But text is easier to compress than video?

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

#70

Post by aidenn0 »

jiggunjer wrote: post #69
aidenn0 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect an h265 compressed stream of a browser would be lower bandwidth than this, particularly for image heavy pages

But text is easier to compress than video?

Only some of what is sent is text.
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