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> Not that it doesn't look neat, sure. But I do a lot of browsing from my phone, and I've just been spending some money and considering spending more on even a

> Not that it doesn't look neat, sure. But I do a lot of browsing from my phone, and I've just been spending some money and considering spending more on even a partial archiving solution for that. DK has this thing called "bookmark mode" where basically like you know it will only archive the stuff you bookmark. And because your bookmarks are synced from your Chrome mobile browsing to your Chrome desktop the next time you're on your desktop and running DK there it will detect those new bookmarks from your mobile browsing and it will archive and index them for you. > If this could support that use case, you'd have a chance at a paying customer for life. As it is, you've already told me you don't want me, or anyone with a similar use case, as a customer at any price. So there's plenty of space for you in the current system! :) > Why build it with an intimate dependency on Chrome, and not as a general HTTP/HTTPS proxy? I thought about doing that (not the general HTTP proxy idea but maybe I should look into that) I thought about doing that by somehow hacking a way to get the remote debugging port to work on the device (Android or iPhone) versions of Chrome. Basically I think the only way that it opens is if you have your phone plugged in to the Android debugger and hooked up the USB debugging or something like that so I can set it and it may be possible with like a little kind of USB type of dongle stuck in the bottom of your phone or something they may be a way to sort of, while the dongle is stuck in, you can archive your browser history... but I thought that's probably quite a number of steps from here to there.

throwanem 5y ago
Well yeah, that's the thing about a proxy - ~every HTTP/HTTPS user agent supports them, and neither you nor your users need to mess around with Chrome-specific debugging stuff. Just set a proxy up in whatever browser, and all the traffic you want to archive goes through it with no extra effort. Fair warning, HTTPS proxying with packet inspection can be complicated since the proxy needs to terminate TLS in order to see the content; it's exactly like a MITM attack, but in this case performed among friends. This can be problematic in an environment where certificate pinning also exists, but that can be overcome for browsers at least if the root of the proxy's MITM cert is trusted in the system's or browser's certificate store. This is trivial as far as I know on all desktop OSes and on Android; I think you can only do it at the system level in iOS via an MDM profile, and I'm not sure how complicated those are to generate but iirc Boxen and similar OSS Mac config management tools do it, so may serve as a useful reference on the mechanics.
- graderjs 5y ago
  I think that's the reason I don't want to do a proxy because I don't like the idea of terminating TLS. I think it introduces some sort of vulnerability plus as you say technically it can be weird. The advantage of the current system is the users don't have to mess around with browser stuff at all. I just don't like that technical solutions space and solving problems in that right now anyway as much as I do the browser side. So I don't think I'll do that for now. But it's good to have something in the future I think if this product really scaled I could definitely look at the proxy solution as a way to sort of take it to maximum scale for you know the maximum number of users. But I think the way that it currently is would let it achieve some sort of product market fit and scale within a niche so I could see if it was really worth growing further. If it did grow then I could maybe use other solutions like your proxy one to scale it to a high number of people. There's actually another solution though which involves remote browsing. So I could bundle it incorporate it it's cloud surface with another product that I have browser box and so people do all their browsing on the cloud and we can do all the archiving on the cloud and you can access that where my browser from your mobile device so anything you browse through that will be archived for you and then we could sync it so you could like download those archives that you know various points or search through them online or something like that. Hopefully for now the bookmark mode can satisfy your use case but if not I understand and I feel a bit sorry for you if that's the case because I would like to think that you know you could benefit from this but you know we're not able to please everybody and while I feel sad for you about that that's just the way that it is, we can only deliver to a niche right now. So thank you for your technical information and sharing about your use case anyway I really appreciate that so I hope you give the product a try and you know let me know what you think.

throwanem 5y ago

Well yeah, that's the thing about a proxy - ~every HTTP/HTTPS user agent supports them, and neither you nor your users need to mess around with Chrome-specific debugging stuff. Just set a proxy up in whatever browser, and all the traffic you want to archive goes through it with no extra effort. Fair warning, HTTPS proxying with packet inspection can be complicated since the proxy needs to terminate TLS in order to see the content; it's exactly like a MITM attack, but in this case performed among friends. This can be problematic in an environment where certificate pinning also exists, but that can be overcome for browsers at least if the root of the proxy's MITM cert is trusted in the system's or browser's certificate store. This is trivial as far as I know on all desktop OSes and on Android; I think you can only do it at the system level in iOS via an MDM profile, and I'm not sure how complicated those are to generate but iirc Boxen and similar OSS Mac config management tools do it, so may serve as a useful reference on the mechanics.

graderjs 5y ago
I think that's the reason I don't want to do a proxy because I don't like the idea of terminating TLS. I think it introduces some sort of vulnerability plus as you say technically it can be weird. The advantage of the current system is the users don't have to mess around with browser stuff at all. I just don't like that technical solutions space and solving problems in that right now anyway as much as I do the browser side. So I don't think I'll do that for now. But it's good to have something in the future I think if this product really scaled I could definitely look at the proxy solution as a way to sort of take it to maximum scale for you know the maximum number of users. But I think the way that it currently is would let it achieve some sort of product market fit and scale within a niche so I could see if it was really worth growing further. If it did grow then I could maybe use other solutions like your proxy one to scale it to a high number of people. There's actually another solution though which involves remote browsing. So I could bundle it incorporate it it's cloud surface with another product that I have browser box and so people do all their browsing on the cloud and we can do all the archiving on the cloud and you can access that where my browser from your mobile device so anything you browse through that will be archived for you and then we could sync it so you could like download those archives that you know various points or search through them online or something like that. Hopefully for now the bookmark mode can satisfy your use case but if not I understand and I feel a bit sorry for you if that's the case because I would like to think that you know you could benefit from this but you know we're not able to please everybody and while I feel sad for you about that that's just the way that it is, we can only deliver to a niche right now. So thank you for your technical information and sharing about your use case anyway I really appreciate that so I hope you give the product a try and you know let me know what you think.