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Brow.sh: a modern text-based browser
- geoffeg 6y agoThis is really interesting, I'll have to play around it. I've been browsing news sites with "links" a lot more lately as it usually just gets me the content I want and it does so very fast. No ads, no popups, no JS - just the content. I could achieve the same thing with noscript and a few other extensions but those generally still aren't as fast and simple as links.
- throwaway201103 6y agoIt's a startling example of how fast the web would be if it didn't have so much bloat.
- trollied 6y agoIt’s good to see terminal-based browsers are still being developed. I used to use w3m and lynx back in the day, and found them to be very useful at times (such as only having a GPRS signal available - makes browsing on a “full fat” browser impossible). Paired with screen (though I guess mosh would be a good option these days) to enable a resumable session in case the network dropped, of course.
- timdorr 6y agoNote that this isn't a "true" terminal-based browser. It's built on a WebExtension running in Firefox that renders out the DOM as text to a Go-based CLI client. It's not a browser engine running in your terminal, it's more of a VNC over TTY.
- trollied 6y agoAh, noted. Must check and see if w3m and lynx have evolved to cope with the modern JavaScript web!
- Hfdlmsh 6y agow3m hasn't, thank goodness.
- reshie 6y agosome find that as a perk.
- simcop2387 6y agoElinks is the only one close, but last I tried it there were still issues
- Fnoord 6y agoTerrible suggestion. From [1] "On 17 March 2017, OpenBSD removed ELinks from its ports tree, citing concerns with security issues and lack of responsiveness from the developers.[5]" Last stable is from 2009. Last development release 2012. Elinks is dead. Realize it uses an old version of Spidermonkey (JS). Elinks should not be used in a production environment, period. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinks
- vlunkr 6y agoI don't think there's a single reason to use a text-based browser in a production environment.
- Fnoord 6y agoI think you're perfectly able to understand what I meant there: anything other than research purpose in an isolated environment e.g. sandbox.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agobrowsing through SSH
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agoIsn't it more like a TTY mode of VNC more apt? E.g., rendering the X commands as ASCII?
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoI like Links more than Lynx.
- nchase 6y agolast time I tried this it was great on my laptop, but because it uses Firefox in the background for rendering, it brought my t2 small instance to its knees. I wonder if they've done anything clever to make it more efficient since then?
- soheil 6y agoIt 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.
- fathead_glacier 6y agoThe 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.
- soheil 6y agoIn that case it'd be interesting to see a text-based VNC that works system-wide not just as a browser.
- trungdq88 6y agoThank 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!
- samatman 6y agoMosh 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 https://eternalterminal.dev The native scroll support and tmux-aware behavior are both pretty slick.
- mcky 6y agoI 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.
- javier10e6 6y agoMust check. In my console only Raspberry-pi I use elinks to browse and scrape web info.
- enriquto 6y agoElinks is a hauntingly good software. I'm a bit sad that it's not actively developed, but I find solace in the thought that it is already a nearly perfect crystal that cannot be substantially improved upon.
- Tanath 6y agoFelinks is an actively maintained fork.
- Fnoord 6y agoElinks should not be used in a production environment as I argued here [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25131204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25131204
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21630423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21630423 (a bit) 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552 (a lot) 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17542919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17542919
- ChrisArchitect 6y agothis is not new, (2018) please see some previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552
- 1-6 6y agoThis appears again and again from time to time on ycombinator.
- freedomben 6y agoI'm glad stuff like this does because I often forget about it, or somehow missed it before. That said I do suspect a lot of the repeats are because there are young people on HN for whom this may be the first time since reaching an age of reason that this has hit the front page.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoya that's fine - stuff resurfaces every once in awhile etc -- but mark it as so (2018) so we know it's not something new and there's years of discussion already.
- definetheword 6y agoLooks like the author had to take some of the services temporarily offline. If you use Brow.sh, consider donating! " Browsh is currently maintained and funded by one person. If you'd like to see Browsh continue to help those with slow and/or expensive Internet, please consider donating. "
- Zhyl 6y agoIf 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
- as_keyof_typeof 6y agoWhy do you say "an actual"? Are you meaning that you think that Browsh is not an actual take on text based browsing?
- justaguy88 6y agoThis is great! Does it know ahead of time if we have colors before sending the response?
- dllthomas 6y agoNo, unless it's getting info from somewhere I'm not thinking of, it has no way of knowing what terminal you're using. In principle, I think the "accept" header is the right place to put that info?
- Arnavion 6y ago`T` or `no-terminal=True` in the querystring will disable ANSI color codes in the response.
- zamadatix 6y agoI think my terminal's font is breaking the v2 graphs because the unfilled braille dots aren't blank rather unfilled circles. The v3 version doesn't work as my terminal doesn't support images. On my Windows box it actually does work surprisingly well with the official curl binary and the graph looks great but the weather emoji mess up alignment towards the end. I think these kinds of inconsistencies are the reason something like the way brow.sh does it makes more sense, if it's not plain text the only reliable way to represent it is via colored fixed width block characters as terminal UIs have been relying on those for ages so they are more widely supported.
- anthk 6y agoIf you need minimal JS support, check edbrowse. This is just a hipster like brag trying to be "modern". If I can't run it under a Pentium3 (at least) at astronomical speeds, this is just a bad try.
- nomel 6y agoNeeding more than minimal JS support doesn’t make one a “hipster”.
- ausjke 6y agoAll I really need is showing imgs in the console, which w3m-img can do along with w3m but you need an xterm instead of the modern consoles(gnome-terminal, konsole,lxterminal, none can show imgs) the docker images of brow.sh needs firefox and the whole pull size is a few hundred MB, can someone list the advantages over lynx/w3m/links2 etc.
- nomel 6y agoMaybe read the second sentence in the link: > Its main purpose is to be run on a remote server and accessed via SSH/Mosh or the in-browser HTML service in order to significantly reduce bandwidth and thus both increase browsing speeds and decrease bandwidth costs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zoid_ 6y agoPretty cool project, didn't feel super snappy on sites which had animation however. Think I'm going to stick with Firefox.
- freedomben 6y agoYes 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 blazing 512 Kbps. I was a developer (working remotely) who's shop had adopted Docker, and it literally took more than 24 hours sometimes to download a docker image. By necessity I switched to having my whole development environment on a cloud VM. The Cloud VM had gigabit connection so docker downloads were blazing fast. All I needed to send across the wire was a tiny bit of text. Mosh was an absolute life saver by the way. I once flew from Anchorage to Salt Lake and had the same mosh session pick up like nothing had happened thanks to roaming abilities. Browsing heavy (i.e. modern) websites was often very difficult too. With high latency and a lot of heavy Javascript sites requiring 10 MB or more, it was a nightmare. I occasionally went up to Eagle Alaska, where internet was even worse. The nearest cell tower was a 4 hour drive away, and the only internet was at the "library" or a crappy satellite link (that far north satellites get less useful). A tool like Browsh is a life line to people in situations like that. In related news, when people talk about the merits of developing with just Vim vs. an IDE, I also recount the same story.
- jonathankoren 6y agoIt says it's "reducing bandwidth", but then it's downloading all the graphics assests so it can render them in very crappy unicode? Why? Wouldn't it make more sense not to download the graphics at all?
- lukeschlather 6y agoAs others have said the point is that you run it on a server that has ample bandwidth, and your client connects via terminal. So you only end up transmitting the "crappy unicode" over the narrow pipe to your end thin client.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tbrock 6y agoWhen I first saw this a while back I got the idea to build a terminal based email client that supported rendering HTML messages using some of the technology behind this. I should really pick that up again.
- formalsystem 6y agoI like this for Jupyter notebooks, slightly quicker than setting up port forwarding
- octoberfranklin 6y agoI use this for Saturn looseleaf binders.
- jake_morrison 6y agoBack 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.
- TeeMassive 6y agoThe return of pixalated porn
- tombh 6y agoDearest 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 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
- keithwinstein 6y agoHeya, 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 mostly "done" at this point (with the exception of 24-bit color support which everybody wants and which we have in Git), and I'm wary of stepping back into the ring myself as the original maintainer who hasn't looked at the code in a long time, and screwing up a release that ends up botching our so-far-good (knock on wood) security record. Which will just take up way MORE time...
- romseb 6y agoI would just like to say thank you for creating mosh, I don't know if I could live without it anymore.
- 6y ago
- WilliamTheFirst 6y agoI could have really used this a while back while doing a web scraping job. While using puppeteer(with chromium), I found that memory usage was quite a huge problem so the best I could do was write scripts explicitly preventing the loading of images and other multimedia assets. I found it still wasn't always enough.
- __MatrixMan__ 6y agoI'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 make cryptocurrency micropayments to whoever contributed the filter that de-bloated that page for me. It would be slow at first, but with a big enough cache and enough users... Glad to know about this project. I may try and adapt it to man-in-the-middle my own web browsing one day.
- mcky 6y agoThis 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)
- smnc 6y agoOne of the old Opera mobile browsers (Mini or Mobile) worked in a somewhat similar way.
- z3t4 6y agoThis is great for remote work where ssh -X lags with high latency. Although I sometimes get stuck (page loading forever. I think it has something to do with the connection to Firefox.)
- kilroy123 6y agoIs https://mightyapp.com/ https://mightyapp.com/ trying to be the advanced version of this?
- ktm5j 6y agoIf it's a "single static binary" the _why_ is there a docker image??
- GekkePrutser 6y agoHmm just tried it... It's ok BUT not too happy with it overall.. On Mac terminal the blocks don't align properly, and on Xterm it starts rolling weird like a CRT TV with the scan lines missing. Also the controls are not using a normal menu and keys that we know from lynx/links/elinks. And the donation nag thing is annoying. First convince me it's great, then ask for donations :) I love the idea but not the execution.
- tinus_hn 6y agoIs this useful for when you need to run a browser on a machine but don’t want to install a display server and all the libraries required for GUI apps?