Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser

https://www.brow.sh

by tombh • 8 years ago

967 322 8 years ago

tombh100• 8 years ago

Some of you may have seen this before under its previous incarnation of "Texttop". Then it was just a hack, but I got some great feedback, so I've spent most of the last 12 months turning it into something serious. It's morphed into more than a mere TTY gimmick. That UNIX philosophy of text being the "universal interface" has somewhat unexpectedly risen to the forefront, such that Browsh is now essentially a text browser engine, serving to both TTY clients and, somewhat ironically, other browsers - see https://html.brow.sh Being able to render any modern site (even WebGL for example) to text seems like an appropriate return to the web's origins. The obvious benefit being to those less fortunate that have slow and/or expensive bandwidth.

Also, I'd be interested in any opinions here about how to financially support this project. At the very least I'd just love to somehow make this my job.

adamredwoods• 8 years ago

My guess is to try upselling features like anonymous browsing, ad-blocking, etc. Other ideas would require discovering use-case scenarios for corporate situations: can it be used as a cms-front end or a way to focus on text for localization? a11y testing? You never know.

tombh100• 8 years ago

What do you think of its potential for use in regions with slow and/or expensive Internet (South America seems to be the worst off here), where I could come to some arrangement with a local NGO/GO to fund server costs and development?

shubb• 8 years ago

Maybe this would be useful to commercial shipping companies who run thier net over satellite and similar.

That would work nicely as a hosted service with an app. Like a more aggressive version of opera's bandwidth reduction.

The military might have similar problems.

It's not really ready fir consumers yet though.

themodelplumber• 8 years ago

Charge for plugins? For example, user macros, user styles, integration of other apps, advanced bookmarks, etc. Sell merch, create your own awards for lo-fi websites and charge people to nominate their sites. Hope it works out for you!

tombh100• 8 years ago

Loads of ideas! So well first I need to identify what people want and are willing to pay for.

I like the awards for lo-fi websites, I could have a showcase section of the website.

mylons• 8 years ago

dude, very cool.

monch1962• 8 years ago

I could see this being part of a lightweight browser UI testing framework.

There's already ways to drive a headless UI (Selenium, puppeteer), but they require automation testers to interact with page elements via the "normal" DOM which can be quite painful in terms of creating automation tests - DSLs to drive DOM automation are necessarily huge.

I could envision browser automation via browsh using a very small DSL e.g. browsh.url() to navigate to a URL, browsh.click() to click on an element, browsh.text_exists?() to check whether text exists, browsh.link_exists?() to check whether a clickable link exists

tombh100• 8 years ago

I've thought of that too. The trouble is that Browsh's text renderer is more of a science than an art. It's quite hard to actually get a guarantee of the same text twice, which is a pretty important condition of testing.

But yes, I'd love for Browsh to be used in such a way!

mherrmann• 8 years ago

Check out (my) https://heliumhq.com. Not text-based but very high-level.

mamcx2• 8 years ago

Well stay chargin for it. Put a button and give a dedicated connection for people that pay?

tombh100• 8 years ago

For sure that's definitely an option, for both the SSH service and the html.brow.sh service. As people get to learn about Browsh let's see if there are any takers.

masukomi• 8 years ago

Also, I'd be interested in any opinions here about how to financially support this project. At the very least I'd just love to somehow make this my job.

I think before you can answer that question you have to figure out if there are enough geeks like you who think this is a useful enough tool to run / use regularly. They'll likely pay you $. Alternately, find use case where even just a few users / companies would pay $$$ each for some thing that it does that you can't easily get anywhere else and helps get work done.

For me it looks cool, and i'll give it a try, but i'm more likely to stay with my normal browser because with plugins like vimium i don't have to reach for my mouse very much. That's actually one of the reasons i use the command line so much. Make it work without constantly using my mouse and I'd be far more likely to use it. Once i'm using it regularly, then I'd be starting to think "I wish it would..." and then making those wishes come into practice is something i'd support. This is kind of a weird / esoteric thing that would just gradually improve so... maybe Patreon is a better route for getting support than normal software / feature / plugin sales.

personally, IF I find myself using it regularly, i think i'd be more likely to support you via a Patreon type regular donation.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Thanks for your advice, it's really helpful. I agree, I think it has a large gimmick factor, for which I don't think there's a huge amount of $ (though it does help spread the word). You have a good point about finding a niche in a large company. As others have mentioned this looks like it would be to do with endeavours out in the field so to speak, where the Internet is slow and/or expensive. So eg; military or shipping operations.

So at the moment I guess it's just best to hope as many different people and organisations see Browsh as possible and seeing what sticks and where.

I've got Patreon, Paypal and Bitcoin setup already: https://www.brow.sh/donate/

g-harel2• 8 years ago

weird, that link doesn't work on localhost /s

thaumaturgy• 8 years ago

I've been messing about with a toy search engine for a long time, and starting to tie it into my Pinboard bookmarks (6,000 and counting!), and the most irritating part of the whole thing for a while has been extracting useful text from modern websites.

I'd considered using a headless browser setup but I never got 'round to it.

If you structured this as a paid service where I could make some number of requests for some amount of money and get back basically what you've got now in monochrome mode, I'd probably sign up pretty quick.

This is sort of relevant to some other recent HN discussions around the trouble with large-scale crawling and the trouble with so much of it being restricted to Google now, so I don't think I'm the only one.

tombh100• 8 years ago

I've thought about this too, because https://text.brow.sh certainly does make scraping websites easy, you just need to `curl` and `grep`. But the trouble is, as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Browsh's text renderer is more of an art than a science, it doesn't guarantee consistent results for every render. Whereas of course downloading HTML and using something like Beautiful Soup does give a much better guarantee of consistency.

jacquesm6• 8 years ago

The web 1995-2005 or thereabout will be the best documented period of humanity and it is saddening to see how payload has been replaced by cruft to the point that we might as well have remote PDF viewers.

So much for 'the semantic web' I guess.

nemild• 8 years ago

Re: financial support, have you seen Nadia Eghbal's Lemonade Stand for a whole set of ideas:

A handy guide to financial support for open source.

https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand

tombh100• 8 years ago

Fantastic resource, thanks

dheera• 8 years ago

Damn. Even Youtube works. Never thought I'd be watching movies over SSH.

qplex2• 8 years ago

AAlib [0] has been around for ages. But yeah, it's a cool trick to watch movies in a terminal.

However I think there is very little real use for image to text-as-image conversion.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib

primitivesuave• 8 years ago

This is not my favorite monetization strategy, but if you had enough people using your browser you could serve text-based ads in place of the now-pixelized image ads on the screen. To test this model right away, you could contact a developer-focused ad network like Carbon (https://carbonads.net/)

Another insidious idea is to pitch this browser to companies as a way to reduce wasted time on social media and time-wasting websites - employees could be trained on how to quickly extract text information from a website that is relevant to some business goals, without getting distracted by the time-wasting opportunities that a browser provides.

What I would love to see (but where far fewer promise of riches lay) is to use this as part of some great developer tool - this seems it could be a more intuitive way to test an interface than Selenium. Until then I look forward to personally supporting and using your awesome project!

tombh100• 8 years ago

This approach has already crossed my mind, and its not my favourite either. But if it enables me to make Browsh my job then I'd be open to it. I actually already self-advertise Browsh at the bottom of every https://html.brow.sh page. So I'd certainly be open to placing a simple ad link there at least.

Ha, the "reduce wasted time" idea is interesting one!

Thanks for your support :)

bryanrasmussen4• 8 years ago

if it was pluggable into other browsers, or other browser's extensions, then charge a small fee for that kind of usage.

tombh100• 8 years ago

I've had the idea to make a webextension that transparently proxies all top-level URL bar requests to html.brow.sh, that way you can click on links in other applications that open in your browser and instantly get the Browsh version. I think it could a fantastic resource for those in the world that have slow and/or expensive internet.

First though I really need to improve html.brow.sh

bryanrasmussen4• 8 years ago

actually one problem you have here, and you're probably realizing from the responses, is a problem I had with a personal project that could be used to build lots of things that people wanted, but in itself was not a thing people want. In order to monetize you need to build one of the things people want, but in doing so you put focus into one area and stop improving the generic base of everything, as well as not producing many little toy examples of the possibilities of your technology.

tombh100• 8 years ago

damn, yes, that's indeed perceptive

westoncb• 8 years ago

I've found myself running into this same thing as well. An obscure sort of problem no one warns you about ;)

jacquesm6• 8 years ago

This is typical for infrastructure and foundation libraries. Nobody made money on jpeg, but jpeg powered entire industries.

asdojasdosadsa• 8 years ago

Out of pure curiosity, how much are you profiting currently out of it?

tombh100• 8 years ago

Since launch I've had just under £100 in donations.

tsukikage• 8 years ago

Stupid question: how do you follow links without a mouse? e.g. with Lynx you'd use the arrow keys / enter - this doesn't seem to work here, and there's nothing obvious in the keybindings document.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Sadly, it's not a feature yet, but it's planned: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/85

josh9214• 8 years ago

Regarding financing, perhaps you should consider collaboration with the Tor Project.

Many Tor users disable Javascript, because Javascript sometimes has anonymizing vulnerabilities. But disabling Javascript cripples many websites.

But I can type html.brow.sh/https://example.com via my Tor browser and get a non crippled website, even with Javascript disabled. This is a very practical use case and I think many will want to pay you to make it work better.

tombh100• 8 years ago

I'm not very familiar with Tor. But from what I gather I think Browsh will be of interest to Tor users more than Tor network itself?

vorpalhex2• 8 years ago

I'd be interested in any opinions here about how to financially support this project. At the very least I'd just love to somehow make this my job.

One of the cases where developers still use text based browsers is in attempting to check accessibility of websites. For many large enterprises, there's a legal or contractual requirement to ensure a certain level of accessibility for users with disabilities.

vanderZwan• 8 years ago

Nice thought, but it doesn't seem to be that kind of textual browser. Unless it really relies on accessibility to work at all.

bthallplz• 8 years ago

It can also work for general usability testing: after testing my personal site, I realized that with the graphical fuzzing that this offers, even I couldn't identify what my site's main navigation buttons (made in CSS, no less!) said or whether they were even links. This let me see graphic through the lens of people that cannot see graphics well, so yay!

tombh100• 8 years ago

I'd never thought of this, thanks.

se7entime• 8 years ago

Will you put it in Flatpak or Snap?

tombh100• 8 years ago

It's not a high priority but yes I will. Goreleaser, the tool I use to build the binaries, debs, rpms and taps, already has code from Snaps.

snarfy2• 8 years ago

Run it as a service. I send in a URL and maybe TERM type, you send back the rendering complete with escape sequences etc.

You might not see the need for this, but others will. I could see it being used in some back end workflow.

tombh100• 8 years ago

That's essentially what https://text.brow.sh is already doing right? Eg;

`curl https://text.brow.sh/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17... | grep snarfy`

sevensor3• 8 years ago

Can it be made not to show WebGL, embedded video, and so forth? I enjoy a very serene internet using w3m set to monochrome, with mouse and images turned off. Every now and then it's necessary to use a graphical browser, and it's the sensory equivalent of being woken up by a toddler at 5:30 on Christmas morning.

bovermyer• 8 years ago

What you call "serene," I would call "austere." That's not meant as a denigration, mind you: I'm very curious as to your viewpoint here. What do you enjoy about such an experience?

chaoticmass• 8 years ago

I use elinks--

I like it for reading. I like how all the text is displayed the same, in a fixed width font I'm used to looking at. There's nothing to distract me or get in the way.

flukus• 8 years ago

What do you enjoy about such an experience?

The major benefit is that I don't enjoy an "experience", I just read the content and leave. So much of the modern web is built specifically to prevent that.

sevensor3• 8 years ago

I find the ordinary internet terribly overstimulating. It's a constant din of people screaming for my attention. Even relatively sober sites often have distracting designs that make it hard to focus on the content. Text mode is calming, it cuts straight through the clutter. In text mode, authors have to distinguish themselves by saying something interesting, and it's a lot easier to decide whether that's the case when they have nothing but words with which to make their arguments.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Yes. Just press `ALT+m` to toggle monochrome mode.

saagarjha• 8 years ago

No offense, but why don’t you just continue to use w3m?

sevensor3• 8 years ago

None taken, and I daresay I will. But just as a Chrome user might be open to trying Firefox, I'm open to trying other text mode browsers.

fiatjaf• 8 years ago

Amazing.

Is this relying on an external server to work?

detaro2• 8 years ago

From the GH readme, it seems like it runs a full Firefox locally in the background and then consolifies what that renders.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Exactly

alpaca128• 8 years ago

Is there a way to point it to a different Firefox installation path? It only looks at Program Files{x86} and then quits as it doesn't find the FF installation at Program Files.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Use the `-firefox` flag. However the Windows binary has other problems.

You can use the free live demos though: `ssh brow.sh` and https://html.brow.sh

genpfault• 8 years ago

Browsh consists of a minimal Golang CLI client and a browser webextension. Most of the work is done by the webextension. When the CLI starts, it looks for a compatible browser (currently only Firefox) and starts it in headless mode. Once the browser has started it opens a remote debugging connection and installs the extension.

So a browser wrapper.

beamatronic• 8 years ago

Why wouldn’t you just use lynx?

tombh100• 8 years ago

Lynx doesn't even support modern SSL,let alone HTML5, CSS3, JS, WebGL, WebAssembly - all of which are supported by Browsh.

azernik• 8 years ago

In implementation, sure. But from the user's perspective, it's just a browser.

noobermin3• 8 years ago

But it doesn't work without X, a common use case for lynx/links/w3m

tombh100• 8 years ago

Arguably you could say the same about Opera's "wrapping" of the Chrome libs.

mikorym2• 8 years ago

I was wondering about this. If everything goes through an already installed browser, then what is the advantage that browsh has over a minimalistic fork of Firefox with e.g., lower bandwith features?

jdoliner• 8 years ago

For this to actually give a bandwidth advantage I think the browser would have to be running on a server somewhere... so the browser has become the server.

pkulak• 8 years ago

I guess the point is to install this on some random server somewhere that you can then SSH to. It really does seem like a good way to have a speedy browser experience over even insanely slow network connections.

cup-of-tea• 8 years ago

The point is it works without graphics so you can use it over ssh, for example.

raffleslodge• 8 years ago

Not sure if it's just me but the page is down currently.

tombh100• 8 years ago

By down, do you mean this? https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/58

stiGGG• 8 years ago

Got rickrolled in 2018 gnarf :(

keithnz• 8 years ago

they are getting more complicated these day, the guy invented a whole browser frontend in order to rickroll us! :)

Untit1ed2• 8 years ago

What I really love is that (when the server is working) you can

    ssh brow.sh

And then have a graphical browser from anywhere :D.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Thanks!

What are you seeing when the server isn't working?

Untit1ed2• 8 years ago

Oh it was just timing out, I assumed it was suffering from a HN hug of death but it could've just as easily been my connection :).

WalterGR• 8 years ago

That failed massively for me in Terminal.app on OS X. The browser showed garbled text and horizontal half-height lines.

Is there a reason why Terminal.app might not work?

tombh100• 8 years ago

Terminal.app doesn't support true colour :( So it can't properly take advantage of the UTF-8 half block trick to get 2 pixels of colour from each cell - thus creating the banding effect you see.

bwag2• 8 years ago

Its main purpose is to significantly reduce bandwidth and thus both increase browsing speeds and decrease bandwidth costs.

How does it reduce bandwidth exactly? It still has to grab all the html/css/js for the site being rendered.

mahesh_rm• 8 years ago

does it fetch images? if it does not, there you go..

robrtsql• 8 years ago

I think the use-case is that the user is running their headless browser on a remote server with a good internet connection. Then they open an SSH tunnel to that server from their local machine which has low bandwidth--and the only thing that needs to be received by the local machine is the browsh rendering of the webpage.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Exactly.

As well SSH/Mosh access there's a HTTP service, that currently only outputs static, noninteractive HTML and basic graphics. For example: https://html.brow.sh/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17...

RSZC• 8 years ago

Pretty sweet!

Curious: why headless firefox and not headless chrome? Also: 'its main purpose is...to reduce bandwidth.' How does this reduce bandwidth? Is the assumption that you would deploy browsh on a server and ssh/mosh against that, and the bandwidth savings are to the client? (But full bandwidth usage to the server)?

lucb1e2• 8 years ago

Because Firefox is open source, in the same vein as this project? Just a guess.

NikolaeVarius• 8 years ago

Chromium is also open source

tombh100• 8 years ago

Curiously, Chrome doesn't support extensions in headless mode. And Browsh needs to run some custom CSS and JS to help with parsing, so Chrome was a no go. You can inject CSS and JS using the RPC though, but that RPC standard (https://remotedebug.org/) isn't yet supported by Firefox. So at the time I felt that using the webextension standard was a more cross-browser investment. Perhaps I should revisit that decision.

And yes you're right about the use of a remote server to make use of the bandwidth savings.

brian_• 8 years ago

I'm not sure what the desired outcome should be but successive iterations has strange results: https://html.brow.sh/https://html.brow.sh/https://html.brow.... https://html.brow.sh/https://html.brow.sh/https://html.brow....

tombh100• 8 years ago

That sort of thing is actually causing spikes in load on the cluster. I think the quickness of the requests must skip the cache. So it's a bug really, I just need to detect recursive URLs and extract the deepest link.

g-harel2• 8 years ago

why do you say it's strange? The image is being compressed over and over and the content of the demo page is being added each iteration.

https://html.brow.sh/https://html.brow.sh/https://html.brow....

max_likelihood• 8 years ago

Very cool! I find the pixelated images to be quite charming. One thing I noticed, when I go to https://text.brow.sh it reads: `Welcome to the Browsh plain text client. You can use it by appending URLs like this; https://html.brow.sh/https://www.brow.sh`. Should it be `https://text.brow.sh/https://www.brow.sh` instead?

tombh100• 8 years ago

Thanks. Yes it's like the retro 8-bit style, it has a certain charm I agree.

Damn, I can't believe I missed that! I fixed it in the code and will deploy soon with some other fixes.

vinchuco• 8 years ago

Note your donate link https://html.brow.sh/https://www.brow.sh/donate/ 'broke' the QR code. Amazing work!

milankragujevic• 8 years ago

It's a bit broken on my blog, I'd like to know why so I can fix it...

https://html.brow.sh/https://milankragujevic.com/vip-drop-i-...

tombh100• 8 years ago

I can see that Browsh's injected JS isn't able to hide your text to take the screenshot, which in turn means that Browsh can't parse the text. There could be a number of reasons for this, but it's very much Browsh's responsibility here, not yours. I've added your site as an issue on the repo: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/75

katzgrau• 8 years ago

The nice thing about text based browsers is that you can use them at work and everyone thinks you're cranking code but you're really just on HN

jasonkostempski• 8 years ago

Except the network admin that makes the hush-hush employee website usage reports for the boss.

e12e3• 8 years ago

Not if all they see is an ssh connection...

johnklos2• 8 years ago

...aaand it's written in Go...

So it's modern in that it won't run on anything but popular platforms, and text-based in that it shows you text using a huge, multi-gigabyte program. Looks like links / lynx aren't going to be replaced any time soon.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Links doesn't even support modern SSL :/

The modern age requires a multi-gigabyte program to use the Internet, that's just our reality. So the whole point of Browsh is that you can now offload this from your local machine (eg. to a remote VM) and re-experience the net as pure text, how it used to be.

theamk• 8 years ago

I am fairly sure that both linx and lynx work with modern SSL.

In fact, just checked on Ubuntu 16.04 -- both links (2.12) and lynx (2.8.9...) work fine with https://google.com and https://news.ycombinator.com for example.

dang2• 8 years ago

...aaand it's written in Go...

Please don't do snarky tropes here.

mullikine• 8 years ago

This is a text automation dream coming true

aumerle2• 8 years ago

You might want to consider adding support for displaying proper terminal graphics, instead of using pixelated ones (which I assume are done using unicode block drawing symbols?).

See https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html

tombh100• 8 years ago

I'm actually already pretty decided against this. Simply because I won't the basic engine to be as text-focused as possible, as then we have a universal source of the modern web in pure text format, that multiple other clients (terminals being only one) can make use of. And besides graphics are orders of magnitude more bandwidth heavy than text, which somewhat defeats the purpose of Browsh.

aumerle2• 8 years ago

Rendering images using unicode block symbols does not make them text, it just makes them pixelated. And you can always down sample images to reduce the bandwidth cost and still get a much better rendering than you achieve currently. For example you can convert the images to indexed 256 color compressed PNG and transmit that, which would reduce bandwidth by a factor of ~4x while still giving you much better rendering.

But anyway, it was just a suggestion, it's your project, you should feel free to do what you think is best for it.

mlinksva• 8 years ago

Reminds me a bit of reading about (I don't recall actually using one) web accelerators, or proxies that would retrieve and strip down content requested by a low powered/bandwidth client. I think these have pretty much disappeared over the last 10 years as bandwidth increased and mobile devices became more powerful.

Added: I guess https://www.opera.com/turbo still provides this feature. Is there anything comparable that can be self-hosted?

trepanne• 8 years ago

This is cool. Had you not considered using a pixellated Sean Connery as the logo?

alpb• 8 years ago

This likely has copyright/trademark implications. :)

tombh100• 8 years ago

Yesh I had :D

hestefisk• 8 years ago

This kind of stuff helps restore my faith in humanity. It makes me feel like a hacker again. Life starts and ends with the command line.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Wow, thanks!

nagarc• 8 years ago

Super

madmax96• 8 years ago

Awesome software, this is totally something I could see myself use regularly.

Heads up: on my Mac, browsh isn't properly resetting the tty when it crashes.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Yes, sorry about that. I'm still getting used to Golang. So I need to consistently catch panics and I ensure the right ANSI escape sequence gets sent to the terminal before it finally exits.

davewasthere• 8 years ago

What's with the Virus warning with the windows binary?

Comes up with BrowserModifier Win32/Unwaders.B!ml detected.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Do you still get the warning with the latest v1.2.3? https://www.brow.sh/downloads/

column• 8 years ago

SentinelOne sees it as a virus

wowtip• 8 years ago

Windows Defender says:

Trojan:Win32/Fuery.B!cl | Severe

pwaai• 8 years ago

how does it know how to convert a webpage to a ascii?

tombh100• 8 years ago

Ha, that's a very long story. The gist though is that some custom CSS forces a given webpage into a strict, monospaced, mono-sized grid. Then JS queries DOM text nodes for their contents and precise positions. Then using the standard rules of text flow the exact position of every character can be fairly reliably derived.

enriquto4• 8 years ago

that's beautiful, where can we find this cool CSS file?

Klasiaster• 8 years ago

The algorithm used in chafa for img→unicode would improve the image quality: https://github.com/hpjansson/chafa/

daleroberts2• 8 years ago

Or this one: https://github.com/daleroberts/tv

therealmarv3• 8 years ago

amazing quality!

comesee2• 8 years ago

There really just needs to be a terminal API for true pixel graphics. Something like sixel but modernized and cleaned up. There's no need to hack in graphics on top of Unicode block characters, which negates backwards compatibility anyway.

Endy2• 8 years ago

Requiring a full version of WebExtensions Firefox is a real deal-breaker in terms of memory hogging (that and only having an x64 Windows binary). Why not do what Pale Moon, SRWare Iron, Chrome-Opera, Vivaldi (i.e. Opera-Chrome 2), and others have done, and create a full browser based on the FF code instead of requiring a separate install?

Still, I think for all the major benefits of text-based browsing, Lynx, Links, and eLinks are still far preferable as lightweight solutions.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Browsh's raison d'etre is really about saving bandwidth. I first had the problem of bandwidth whilst living in Ladakh in Northern India, where I simply could not use the modern web. I expect Browsh not to be run on the same machine as the user, instead it runs somewhere where there is good internet and the user then accesses its output via either SSH/Mosh or the HTML service.

Linking to FF/Chrome's libs is certainly an option and I agree a better approach, it's just a learning curve I wasn't willing to invest in.

Endy2• 8 years ago

Did Links/eLinks/Lynx not provide a better benefit in terms of bandwidth? It seems like trying to process it the way you're doing would lead to more overall load, rather than less.

textmode2• 8 years ago

"As of writing in 2018, the average website requires downloading around 3MB and making over 100 individual HTTP requests. Browsh will turn this into around 15kb and 2 HTTP requests - 1 for the HTML/text and the other for the favicon."

Does "100 individual HTTP requests" mean 100 TCP connections?

As far as I know, according to RFC 2616, connection keep-alive was intended to promote making numerous HTTP requests. In fact, IME, most web servers default to setting max-requests at 100. Some are higher.

Following the guidance of the RFCs, for decades I have been using this HTTP feature to make 100 requests to a site in a single connection. That is 100 pages of HTML in one quick TCP connection. If I retrieve 3MB, it is 3MB of HTML from the website and zero from third parties. (Further, I have written filters to remove junk from the HTML and print only the content I want, e.g. for reading or to import into database. If I need to split into separate files, which is rare, csplit works nicely.)

In order to achieve this efficiency I could not and do not use a popular browser authored by ad-supported entities. I am an avid text-based web user who has no need for ads, graphics, and other external resources, e.g. Javascript. As such, I can use clients that can support http pipelining according to the RFCs. It works very well; no complaints.

Best of luck with this project.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Oh! I didn't know that, I'm sure you're right. What do you think a better wording would be?

therealmarv3• 8 years ago

no alternative to links2 which is downloading much less (airplane etc.)

tombh100• 8 years ago

I don't understand your point

therealmarv3• 8 years ago

Don't get me wrong. Appreciate the project and effort. Well done and amazing. But the only time I use a text based browser is when I have very very bad connection (which happened once or twice e.g. in an airplane). But would be better for comparing links2 vs. mosh+remote browsh. Nevertheless I don't want to keep running some vm (even when it's small) just for my very seldom text browser sessions ;)

I will keep browsh in mind when I'm again on some remote island. Could be a no brainer to install adhoc on a remote vm then.

z_open• 8 years ago

If it doesn't have a script/cookie manager (similar to umatrix) then it's worthless. I had the same issue with qutebrowser.

tombh100• 8 years ago

You can manually add any of Firefox's extensions: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/45

dang2• 8 years ago

Please don't be dismissive of someone's work like this, even if you do want a script/cookie manager.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hexadecimal7e4• 8 years ago

Awesome work! Great stuff! Love from an terminal nerd here. Hope you succeed with this project.

Question: how will it work with CAPTCHAs?

tombh100• 8 years ago

I'm planning to add a 'magnifying glass' feature: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/33

TeMPOraL• 8 years ago

Tom, RE that Kubernetes Slack artifacts in the video (4:45), this doesn't look like Browsh bug - it's just a new weird trend that happens on Slack/Discord, of people spamming with emoji reactions, often making them spell out something obscene. Browsh handled this very well, IMO (to be honest, it looked better than on a normal browser, because the actual spam content was pixelized).

tombh100• 8 years ago

Hey thanks! :)) Ha ok, then I should have just not mentioned, but its good to know Browsh actually coped well.

tedmiston• 8 years ago

    $ ssh brow.sh
    All of Browsh's servers are currently busy. Please try again soon.
    Connection to brow.sh closed.

Seems like a cool way to do a demo for something that's a bit painful to install on macOS (would love to see $ brew install browsh). I'll have to give it another look once the HN effect has died down.

filleokus• 8 years ago

For what it's worth, I got the same error, and just downloaded the linked binary [1] and after a quick chmod+x it was up and running (I had a new-ish Firefox in my Applications folder).

[1] https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/releases/download/v1.2....

gbajson2• 8 years ago

In my case it generated SIGSEGV and the "Connection to brow.sh" was closed.

The more interesting that my gnome-terminal still receives/prints some codes. When I hit enter, it tries to execute them!

https://ibb.co/buhqE8 and (ENTER) https://ibb.co/itFz7T

Does anyone of you know the mechanism behind it?

EDIT: Does anyone of you know how to use it to type into terminal "sudo su -"?

tombh100• 8 years ago

This should be fixed in v1.3.2

thomasahle• 8 years ago

I found that the docker version was the easiest to get running on Mac. It's just `docker run -it browsh/browsh`, and it downloads and runs everything automatically.

DidISayTooMuch• 8 years ago

Browsh: My new way to browsh the Internet

- Sean Connery

jhanschoo• 8 years ago

Seeing as images are so pixelated as to be near-indistiguishable, I think it would be nice for browsh to have a status line where it shows accessibility metadata (e.g. alt="" attributes) of whatever element is currently in focus.

It might also be nice to have a mode where images are just replaced by filled boxes that are more visually distinguished from the surrounding content.

tombh100• 8 years ago

That's a great idea about the `alt` metadata, thank you.

Have you got an example URL for a page that would benefit from those filled boxes you mention?

hyperpallium• 8 years ago

Which of the ARM downloads work on android?

tombh100• 8 years ago

Just researching this now. Looks like I need to use `GOARM=7` during build. I have no idea if that would put out all those that were relying on `GOARM=6`?

astatine• 8 years ago

I also would find an Android version really helpful. Will save a ton of data when roaming and will probably perform better in poor connectivity regions (only 2G and no 3G/4G). Would be great to know how to get this on an Android device.

rotorblade2• 8 years ago

As I said elsewhere in this discussion thread:

I tried it this morning (lineageOS). Got the arm binary from github, `chmod +x`-ed it on my computer and scp:ed it over to my phone. Ran the binary and got a quick flash of the screen and a `exit status 1` [in termux].

Have not looked into it more than that. Since `browsh` depends on headless firefox, which is not in the termux default repository (it seems), I guess it won't work because termux does not have access to the firefox system app, if that even shits with the headless-functionality. (but here I'm just guessing, a work around may be available)

Would be cool to see working though.

mastrsushi• 8 years ago

Can someone explain the usecase for Text-based browsers? While they're fun to show off to my non-tech friends when running without X11 and looking like a hacker, I've never needed one.

bmn__• 8 years ago

When X is fucked and I need to look up online documentation or download a driver.

When Internet is bad: packet loss at home, or travelling.

When I am fed up with bloated Web sites and don't have Opera 12 installed.

When setting a big font preference renders the Web page unusable.

When I need to browse something on my computer, but I am away and only have my phone with me. I can use ssh, but I cannot use vnc.

dmux• 8 years ago

I once worked with a software system where the preferred way of interacting with its admin features was using lynx. It's a great way to provide menu-based software configuration.

shripadk• 8 years ago

Absolutely love the project! Also, this is probably the first time I felt happy being Rick-rolled!

shp0ngle• 8 years ago

Feedback:

For some reason, it maxes out my CPU usage, all 4 cores full speed, on a simple webpage with some light javascript.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Can you identify the process that was causing it? What size was your terminal window. And if possible the `./debug.log` file from having run `browsh -debug` could be useful. Thanks.

peter_retief2• 8 years ago

I gave it a try with debian x64 binary, got a nil pointer on a path error /home/travis/gppath etc

tombh100• 8 years ago

Does it look related to this? https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/73

peter_retief2• 8 years ago

Yup

void_starer• 8 years ago

Also check out: Emacs eww. Handy when you are reading through a manual with lots of code examples, and copy pasting from a web page becomes work by itself.

Just in case you're put off by the thought of Emacs keychords, note that you can also use mouse to move backward and forward through history (it has icons for those), and of course you can click links.

But more importantly, it's Emacs. So if you wanted, you can press a key have the code copy-pasted to a temp file, run the compiler on that, display the result in a new window and file away both the code and the result to an org file for further studying.

rabidrat• 8 years ago

Awesome work, fellow textpunk!

joemi• 8 years ago

Neat project. It seems to have trouble rendering text from some text heavy pages. For instance, see the missing characters in the posts here: https://html.brow.sh/https://old.reddit.com/

tombh100• 8 years ago

Yes, I know :/ I'm pretty sure it's related to the issues the terminal client has here: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/42

At least with the terminal client successive frame updates eventually render the text - a luxury we don't have yet with html.brow.sh

GoToRO2• 8 years ago

Just a heads up: enter https://www.brow.sh:443/ url here http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/lookup

mirimir2• 8 years ago

That just means that someone rated it that way.

The owner ought to dispute that.

GoToRO2• 8 years ago

Yes. My point is that people are blocked to access the website because that list is used by some firewalls to allow or block access.

ekzy• 8 years ago

That sitereview.bluecoat link hijacked my “back” button (browser history) and I was stuck on the page. I hate when websites do that, please don’t post such links

tombh100• 8 years ago

I've been watching this: https://www.virustotal.com/#/url/54ab74be93601eb2f252364829c...

Because yesterday Google Safe Browsing considered this URL: https://html.brow.sh/mail.google.com a phishing attack. Even though the html.brow.sh service is non-interactive, it doesn't even return `<form>` tags, let alone JS.

datalus• 8 years ago

are there any working examples of WebGL? i can't seem to get any on threejs.org to run in Chrome 67 or Firefox 62.0b6

tombh100• 8 years ago

Embarrassingly, I need to remove WebGL from Browsh's features, as WebGL doesn't work in Firefox's headless mode. I certainly saw it working in the early days when I wasn't using Firefox headless in order to debug the injected CSS Browsh uses to render pages.

Sigh, so I best remove 'WebGL' from the homepage :(

tombh100• 8 years ago

Actually it does work if you run Browsh with `browsh -with-gui`

ryan-allen• 8 years ago

Really cool! I couldn't figure out if I could enter values in inputs (e.g. go to google, perform a search). Might be out of scope or I might have missed something? It's super cool. I really like it!

tombh100• 8 years ago

You can! It can just be hard sometimes to find where to click the mouse :/ I need to find a better way to provide visual cues for input boxes.

Thanks :)

waivek• 8 years ago

links is the best text based browser because it has mouse support.

pininja• 8 years ago

Browsh also has mouse support judging by the showcase video.

drinchev• 8 years ago

For someone stuck in the ssh demo, as myself. Ctrl+Q will exit the browser and end the ssh connection.

Grue3• 8 years ago

Sadly it doesn't seem like it can render even basic HTML forms, which other text browsers can do. Otherwise it'd be very useful.

[1] https://html.brow.sh/https://ichi.moe/

tombh100• 8 years ago

The html.brow.sh service is quite far behind the terminal client in terms of features. Besides there's big hurdles over privacy if html.brow.sh starts letting users log into sites.

beefield2• 8 years ago

Just wonder what kind of experience one should expect with 2400 bps? (Iridium go unlimited global satellite connection that costs around 135 USD per month. I think Go has some limitations so I do not know how much one would need to hack things around to get ssh terminal working properly)?

tombh100• 8 years ago

This is really the perfect use case for Browsh. I first had the idea for it when I was in the deserts of Ladakh where you'd get around 3kb/s speeds.

So what you need to do is install Browsh on a remote server along with Mosh. Then from your own personal computer you can use the Mosh client to get Browsh working, albeit, quite slowly, in your terminal.

So you don't need to touch Go at all.

Let me know if you want any help, I'd love to get you setup as, like I say, this is precisely what I made Browsh for.

beefield2• 8 years ago

I do not have currently the hardware (nor immediate need for it) it is just something I have been wondering how much it would cost to get properly global intrnet connection. I think Iridium Go does not allow connections from other than selected apps, you can't make a generic internet connection from a laptop through go. But this is just based on what I have read, I have no first hand experience.

enriquto4• 8 years ago

I love text-based browsers, and this is the one whose display looks best (but i would like to disable images/animations). This being a work in progress, the most important feature needed immediately is a boost in performance. I have a very powerful workstation, and just following a link and rendering the next page takes almost a second. (In lynx, w3m and in elinks it is instantaneous.)

tombh100• 8 years ago

Browsh is really aimed at people with slow and/or expensive Internet that would benefit with having the main browser engine running remotely. You then access the output of Browsh via either SSH/Mosh or HTML serivice.

But nevertheless you might like Browsh's monochrome toggle: `ALT+m`

enriquto4• 8 years ago

I like colors, my problem is mostly the sluggishness. I follow a link and I have to wait a while, without any feedback, until the new page is ready. There is no reason for these delays (from the point of view of the user). If I am interested in text-only browsing, the other browsers offer a much more user-friendly experience.

gfalcao• 8 years ago

amazing, great job!!!

fubase• 8 years ago

Hyper on macOS struggles quite a bit with this. It ran fine in Terminal.

aminmemon• 8 years ago

Seems great, but although it is unable to load HTML properly on few of the websites I tried. It overlaps the text content on each other. Although, is there any way we at draftss.com could contribute to the project?

tombh100• 8 years ago

Yeah, there's a lot of improvements to be made to the rendering engine.

Sure what sort of contribution were you thinking?

pseingatl• 8 years ago

The MacOS "binary" version:

--isn't a disk image --isn't an app --isn't source code

So what is it?

InfamousSub• 8 years ago

An executable

BeniBoy• 8 years ago

  chmod+x browsh_1.2.3_darwin_amd64

and then run it

  ./browsh_1.2.3_darwin_amd64

Tehnix• 8 years ago

An executable? Haven’t had a chance to check it myself yet, but that’d probably mean you have to chmod +x it, and the run it in a terminal.

jacquesm6• 8 years ago

Mind blown how accurate this is, I've sent you some BTC as token of appreciation even though I do not have any application for what you've built right now. A lot of work has gone into this and it shows.

edit: it's so good that I got confused about which window I was looking at and tried to click links with the mouse :)

tombh100• 8 years ago

Thank you very much indeed.

tramtrist• 8 years ago

running the docker over ssh got me "Failed to connect to Firefox's Marionette within 30 seconds"

tombh100• 8 years ago

If you leave an issue on the Github repo with some debug logs and some info about the server I can look into it.

cJ0th2• 8 years ago

that's pretty awesome. Anyone here knows how I could install this in termux on my android?

rotorblade2• 8 years ago

Would be cool to see working though.

cJ0th2• 8 years ago

thanks for the details. they saved me some troubles. too bad it (apparently) doesn't work. At least they do have good 'ol lynx in their repository :)

tombh100• 8 years ago

I haven't really made it clear enough in the docs yet, but Browsh is meant to be run on a remote server and then accessed over SSH/Mosh or the HTML service. So there's not much advantage to overcoming the hurdles to getting running on Android. You should just SSH or better yet Mosh to access a remote version of Browsh.

gbajson2• 8 years ago

The idea is super cool, but unfortunately it SIGSEGVts a lot.

tombh100• 8 years ago

This should be fixed in version 1.3.2

batat• 8 years ago

Well, it works as expected https://html.brow.sh/http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

jwilk3• 8 years ago

I don't think randomly truncated sentences were expected:

  This is a motherfuc
  And it's fuckin

tombh100• 8 years ago

Yeah, there's still some improvements to made for sure. I actually pushed a little fix in v1.3.2 that should address this.

arendtio• 8 years ago

For those who are interested in how it actually works: https://www.brow.sh/docs/introduction/#design

exikyut• 8 years ago

  $ ssh brow.sh

(It starts, prints "Waiting for Firefox to connect")

Then...

  panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
  [signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x0 pc=0x6de976]

  goroutine 11 [running]:
  browsh/interfacer/src/browsh.handleMouseEvent(0xc4203d3b00)
          /home/travis/gopath/src/browsh/interfacer/src/browsh/tty.go:151 +0x36
  browsh/interfacer/src/browsh.readStdin()
          /home/travis/gopath/src/browsh/interfacer/src/browsh/tty.go:46 +0xd3
  created by browsh/interfacer/src/browsh.TTYStart
          /home/travis/gopath/src/browsh/interfacer/src/browsh/browsh.go:185 +0xf2
  Connection to brow.sh closed.

tombh100• 8 years ago

This should be fix, let me know if you try again and it works.

crtasm2• 8 years ago

Getting an invalid certificate error on https://html.brow.sh/

Sounds great, will bookmark for later.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Does that look related to this? https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/58

crtasm2• 8 years ago

Not at all. Here's the error in firefox, check your intermediate certificates:

html.brow.sh uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. The server might not be sending the appropriate intermediate certificates. An additional root certificate may need to be imported. Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER

rudolph9• 8 years ago

I can’t fully articulate why but I love this!

degenerate• 8 years ago

There's something absolutely British about this 1 min segment of the showcase demo: https://youtu.be/zqAoBD62gvo?t=235

tombh100• 8 years ago

Ha :D

kauegimenes• 8 years ago

What happens if do this:

https://text.brow.sh/http://text.brow.sh/http://text.brow.sh...

scbrg• 8 years ago

Suggestion: Make the Debian depend on firefox | firefox-esr. Currently, it's not possible to install on Debian stable due to that distribution not shipping a package named firefox, only one called firefox-esr.

[edit]: Ah, I notice now that the firefox in stable is too old anyway. Oh, well, never mind then :-)

tombh100• 8 years ago

Ah yeah, thanks for pointing that out. I've added `firefox-esr` anyway, for the day that it gets upgraded past 57.

michaelmior2• 8 years ago

Got a segfault the first time I ran it, but after it ran swimmingly. It would be awesome to have more keyboard shortcuts for terminal use.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Follow this issue to follow Vim-keys integration: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/31

jaytaylor• 8 years ago

Really cool to see how far this has come since it was Texttop.

It reminds me of the txt-web app I created based on my html2text golang pkg. It takes a different (simpler and less sophisticated) approach- bottom up, no fancy rendering:

https://txt.gigawatt.io/jaytaylor.com

(Site source code: https://jaytaylor.com/txt-web)

tombh100• 8 years ago

Nice! Very much in the same spirit :)

ninjakeyboard• 8 years ago

Where do I file a bug? Pornhub doesn't render properly.

hobbes78• 8 years ago

Japanese videos still render correctly, at least the relevant parts...

ausjke• 8 years ago

so this needs firefox installed? what about other text-mode browsers such as lynx, elink2 etc? or even the light-weight GUI browsers such as midori etc?

pixelbath• 8 years ago

You might want to either increase the quality of your JPEG encoding or switch to a different format (GIF might work well at the sizes you're rendering). The compression artifacts from JPEG are very visible on solid-coloured areas: https://i.imgur.com/CcS7gL6.png

tombh100• 8 years ago

Yeah, I agree, I need to play with that. The trouble is, those last few percentages of improved quality often double the Kb weight of a page!

path411• 8 years ago

Seems like it only looks for the 32bit FF binaries on windows so I can't run it sadly. Even tried copying over the 64 bit to the location, but I guess as expected got a reference pointer error.

tombh100• 8 years ago

Follow this issue: https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/issues/32

ohiovr2• 8 years ago

I have been wanting a way to launch a web browser with url from a remote server without a major security problem for a while. This could be even better!

zimpenfish• 8 years ago

Amazing work. Well done.

(I looked at repurposing Firefox’s renderer for Lynx back in the late 90s - primarily for the JS support - but marrying a mountain of complex C++ implementing a dynamic page to crufty old C with bake-at-parse pages was far beyond my abilities or motivation.)

Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser

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