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I mean, I think there's an argument to be made that at this point it's not a text-based browser in the classic sense, so much as an ASCII art frontend for a reg

I mean, I think there's an argument to be made that at this point it's not a text-based browser in the classic sense, so much as an ASCII art frontend for a regular browser. A text-based browser in the traditional sense explicitly wouldn't care about JS and WebGL, but may implement some CSS and image rendering via ASCII art. To be clear: I don't understand the benefit of brow.sh over basically anything else on the market besides looking l33t to non-techie passers-by. It still chews up bandwidth and system resources pulling down and running JS, which also has privacy implications. Limiting JS support was a big selling point of Lynx for lots of people.

derision 7y ago
> text-based browser in the classic sense, so much as an ASCII art frontend is ASCII art not text based? > A text-based browser in the traditional sense explicitly wouldn't care about JS and WebGL I guess that's the difference between "traditional" and "modern"? the whole point of doing something different is to stray away from the traditional > I don't understand the benefit of brow.sh over basically anything else I don't know if this is exactly how brow.sh works, but if it does its a use case for me. In my case, I have some remote machines whose IPs are whitelisted for certain third party vendors. These vendors have web portals we can access, but only on those machines. If I could use this to proxy through and be able to hit those web portals through those machines, it would be useful for me
- _verandaguy 7y ago
  >is ASCII art not text based? ASCII is, but this isn't text-based. It's Firefox Quantum based, and then it probably downsamples graphics to represent them as ASCII while also scraping text. It's very much just a text-based frontend, not a text-based browser, for a regular browser. In hindsight this might not _literally_ use ASCII art, but hopefully the point gets across. >the whole point of doing something different is to stray away from the traditional Sure, but I genuinely see the value prop for brow.sh. It's strictly heavier than Firefox assuming it offloads the JS execution and at least some of the rendering to headless Firefox. RE: your use case, why not just set up transparent HTTP proxies that enforce whitelists on those hosts? That's a much less cumbersome solution.

derision 7y ago

> text-based browser in the classic sense, so much as an ASCII art frontend is ASCII art not text based? > A text-based browser in the traditional sense explicitly wouldn't care about JS and WebGL I guess that's the difference between "traditional" and "modern"? the whole point of doing something different is to stray away from the traditional > I don't understand the benefit of brow.sh over basically anything else I don't know if this is exactly how brow.sh works, but if it does its a use case for me. In my case, I have some remote machines whose IPs are whitelisted for certain third party vendors. These vendors have web portals we can access, but only on those machines. If I could use this to proxy through and be able to hit those web portals through those machines, it would be useful for me

_verandaguy 7y ago
>is ASCII art not text based? ASCII is, but this isn't text-based. It's Firefox Quantum based, and then it probably downsamples graphics to represent them as ASCII while also scraping text. It's very much just a text-based frontend, not a text-based browser, for a regular browser. In hindsight this might not _literally_ use ASCII art, but hopefully the point gets across. >the whole point of doing something different is to stray away from the traditional Sure, but I genuinely see the value prop for brow.sh. It's strictly heavier than Firefox assuming it offloads the JS execution and at least some of the rendering to headless Firefox. RE: your use case, why not just set up transparent HTTP proxies that enforce whitelists on those hosts? That's a much less cumbersome solution.