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Show HN: CloudTabs Web Browser – a streaming web browser on every website

67 points by keepamovin 3y ago

Takennickname 3y ago
Very cool. But what for?
- zb3 3y ago
  Blocking ad-blockers
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  To make sure users have no agency over your site. The screen is just a bunch of pixels being streamed at you, no extensions, no view source, no agency. The purpose is to use web tech, without having to actually expose your site to the internet for real.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Could be useful for security isolation - browse any site you want, and if it manages to escape the browser sandbox it still doesn't get your real machine. Also could reduce the resources used locally; browsers with a lot of tabs are a RAM hog.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Adding to what the other comments say you can also: - whack it on a "Web Desktop"! See an example of it embedded here: https://puter.com/app/cloudtabs-browserbox https://puter.com/app/cloudtabs-browserbox - share the browser with other people (right click the "Browser" link from your signed in portal to copy that link then share it!) for real time collaboration in technical support, education, training, UI development, etc - use it to connect to an automation script / puppeteer robot to have a "human in the loop" intervention for solving a Captcha, or helping diagnose an issue, getting it unstuck - use it to capture replayable action sequences and screencasts for bug replay - use it to access devtools from a mobile device - use it to remotely view PDFs, DOCX, and explore archive formats - and many other creative uses from embedding a <BrowserView> in a webpage. We will provide a real API later, like: <script async src="...."></script> <cloudtabs-browser publishable-key="pk_live_..."></cloudtabs-browser>
- mrbluecoat 3y ago
  *cough* accessing blocked sites at work *cough*
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    That too. Hahaha! :)
peterleiser 3y ago
Use Case: As a dog I want to chase my tail so that I can see what happens. Issue: CloudTabs Web Browser locks up and does not respond to further input. Steps to reproduce: 1. On Android smartphone using Chrome browser, visit CloudTabs Web Browser. 2. Within CloudTabs Browser search for Hacker News on DuckDuckGo. 3. Click on link to Hacker News. 4. Find post about CloudTabs Web Browser and click on it. 5. CloudTabs Web Browser starts loading but does not finish and locks up.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Hahaha Thanks! Normally that works. Probably just because there's right now hundreds of sessions simultaneously that it is timing out. Back on the front page, eh? For reference I've included a photo of such a scenario created by one of our "expert dogs": https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/816 https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/816 Perhaps fellow tail chasers out there can enjoy vicariously...at least until the load dies down!!
  - peterleiser 3y ago
    Love the "Loopback" photo! Very cool product, nice work!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ttul 3y ago
Cloudflare acquired a startup from Seattle that took this idea to its logical conclusion: streaming the DOM itself from the remote browser to provide full browser isolation without compromising rendering quality or speed. It would be nice if such a thing existed as open source, as it’s now buried in their security suite never to see the light of day for most of us.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Is that right? Could be a recent acquire if it's DOM mirroring. I heard CF acquired S2 a few years ago, and what S2 did is they created a WebAssembly binary that composited the browser SKIA draw instructions on the client, and streamed the SKIA draw instructions from the server. Not without its issues, but certainly useful. What we do is just stream pixels to the client. Yes it's expensive in terms of bandwidth, relatively. But the advantage is simplicity. And with a close server and bandwidth trending faster and cheaper, with the increasing drive to video consumption across media, I don't see bandwidth as an issue. If you're interested, our code is on GitHub: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox If MailChannels is interested in integrating safe attachment / link opening, we could probably figure something out.
  - internetter 3y ago
    > I don't see bandwidth as an issue. The issue is latency
    - keepamovin 3y ago
      That's why close servers are important. Streaming the SKIA instructions will have the same latency issue as streaming pixels. Something changes on the server, and the change is propagated over the network. Even with DOM mirroring (notoriously buggy), changes need to be synced between remote and local. Regarding latency and CloudTabs specifically: we have 7 regions right now and will put up an 8th in Canada (Canada's second, why so popular there, idk). Our latency is good. Responsive, below a perceptible level. For interactive real-time streaming video it's good. Are you experiencing issues? Do you mind me asking what region you connected to?
sillycube 3y ago
[dead]
zb3 3y ago
This is how websites might be built in the future with the goal of making ad blocking / tracking protection much harder...
- keepamovin 3y ago
  That's an interesting idea. Never thought of that. If the website is rendered on the server, extensions become useless! Wow, now I get the concept that many customers came to me with, but were too shy to reveal. I always thought they were doing this kind of reverse proxy for IP protection, but now I see the bigger picture. Haha! :) Thank you for your insight.
already 3y ago
[dead]
saurik 3y ago
After "Browser Loaded", how long must I wait for something else to happen? (iOS 17.4, btw)
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Sorry, the service are now at like 100% load. This is getting quite a hit. If you get a delay there, you can try reloading. I’ll try adding some more servers if we’re going to be on the front page. I’m bringing up a new server in the US region now. Should be 10 minutes, hopefully will soak up the load
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
xiekomb 3y ago
Remote Browser Isolation is interesting for several use cases. Your demo unfortunately does not work on iOS
- jtbayly 3y ago
  Running latest iOS seemed to work for me.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Oh! It should work. What doesn’t work? I’m testing it on iOS all the time. Which version are you?
amaccuish 3y ago
Reminds me of BlackBerry and Opera, which used to do similar things (server-side rendering) on mobile to use less data.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Thank you! That is such a compliment. BlackBerry was awesome, and it sounds like Opera was so innovative. Although this would probably use more data! Unless you were browsing, say, a very non interactive page that weighed a lot.
keepamovin 3y ago
Ok a new server in US region is up. Unfortunately the disk filled up on the Europe server and Canadian server. I had to nuke all the Ephemeral sessions. Capability should be back now. OS told me disk was 100.0% used when I logged in. It was all tempfs mounted for each user. I never realized its importance. Will need bigger disks. I'll add some timed updates to keep things organized below this point: 17:57:00 Z Will add 2 new 32 core servers in Europe, and Asia, as both those regions are seeing lots of demand. Asia is at 100% right now. 18:03:00 Z Just started creation of the Japan server. Once I get the install script started, I'll move to create the Europe one. 18:18:00 Z Okay, Japan server should be online. Sorry about everybody in SEA that I just nuked your sessions, that must have sucked. The server was hard to manage at 100% utilization. Moving to create a new Europe server now. 18:26:00 Z Okay Europe server is provisioned and setup is starting now. It should be live in about 10 minutes. 18:32:00 Z London server is live. Stats update: since posting to HN 2 hours ago we had about 2000 sessions across (initially) 4 16core 32GB 128disk servers. So far have had to add 3 more 32/64/1TB servers, with disk being the unexpected cost to this type of load. BTW if anyone is reading this how was your experience? Was it slow/fast? Responsive? What region were you in? 18:42:00 Z I'm monitoring the 7 servers now. 18:48:00 Z Right now server selection is based on RTT/ping from client. I'm thinking it might be good to have ping endpoint include the current load. But I don't want to bork it. 19:31:00 Z Okay, load average has been added to the ping check for fastest server. We now pick between the fastest two pings based on which has the lowest load. Should work well.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Is there an about page I'm missing? Or somewhere to see pricing info, or... anything that's not the actual app? (Regardless, it's cool, and does in fact seem to work pretty well)
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Here you go! https://browse.cloudtabs.net/about-everything https://browse.cloudtabs.net/about-everything Folks the servers are all running at 100% load right now. If you like you can check back later, or if you want to be reminded you may leave your email address in this Google Form and we'll send you a reminder when it quiets down a bit! https://forms.gle/ToZWygdRnWAob9sp7 https://forms.gle/ToZWygdRnWAob9sp7
- riedel 3y ago
  The ToS links this: https://dosyago.com/ https://dosyago.com/
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    I saw, but that seems to be a different thing? I was assuming that was the actual underlying software, not this service
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Click on "CloudTabs Home" from the browser to get taken to the Signup area. Inside there it's a normal basic "SaaS" looking app profile with: - My Plan (pricing info and subscribe / manage) - About (including roadmap / impressum) - Settings (for now just the home page!) etc :)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    I'm not fond of having to create an account in order to see information about the product, especially pricing. (Yes, I understand that creating an account doesn't take money, but that doesn't make it a zero-cost action)
thatha7777 3y ago
[flagged]
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Hey Ian We don't know each other and I wasn't aware you were interested. I don't think you've reached out to me before. It sounds like you have a very negative impression of me and my work, and I'm sure it seems like a lot of people have that. I'm sorry for getting the Gumroad capitalization wrong: I've changed that Gumroad to the correct one. I think it's understandable that people can get confused so let's bring some clarity to that. I'll deal with the linked comments first? But I'll add more in edits https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490389 - The difficulty in ELI5: It is hard, because it's like "What can you build with a browser you can embed". Sort of like anything. From your days in YC, you may be connected to another recent YC company also offering embeddable multiplayer browsers. The possibilities are endless. See my other comments in this thread for ideas. - The belief that BrowserBox is a rip off of ViewFinderJS ( I assume that's what "to MuleSoft" something means). Actually, ViewFinderJS was a name I gave the project at one point in the past, because it's like a viewfinder, and I like photography. But I thought the name wasn't as clear as something else. So I basically just changed the name whenever I came up with a better one. Kind of like "open creative process" or "showing my work". Just change to the better name whenever I had one. Some other names in the past were: Zanj, BrowserGap. You can think of CloudTabs as an application of the BrowserBox technology! I understand the succession of names can be confusing but I Just wanted to arrive at the best one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495911 - That is quite a lot of research. Someone really spent some time looking into all the licenses of the past. I was surprised why they didn't just email me: suddenly this research appears on my thread from someone I've never heard from before. Again, it's like the names: I just changed it when I thought I could have a better license. I felt ripped off by open source licenses, and people's sense of entitlement. I felt I'd been duped into using OSS licenses, but people didn't care about me or my work, they just wanted something for themselves. I didn't understand licenses at first. And then I started to get a picture, still within the "dogma" of OSS, and I thought AGPL. But in the end I just realized OSS is not a good fit for something which is a comprehensive product like BrowserBox is (better fit for a component). And at different points I'd read something and think, "Oh, that's the good license" and kind of get excited about it and put it in there, and then change it later. More just like an artistic process. Repainting / reworking. Maybe you can say it's not ideal from a license point of view, but...like, I don't really care. We put in a lot of work on this. And I want to capture the rewards of that. OSS licenses were getting in the way here, so they had to go. But I went through a process of thinking maybe there was a better option in OSS, but turns out there wasn't. I imagine some people are pissed off that they can't get that tech for free. I thought people would pay even if it was OSS, but people are not like that. I'm not worried about the earlier work: it's just like a contribution to the community. We put in so much work since then, people can't take that. At the end of the day, if people want to license our technology, they can just deal with us transparently, in the open, and pay. If it's so valuable, of course they will. And if you're an individual or non-profit, there's the non-commercial option. What else was there? > I think finding an elegant (and not shady) way of providing clear, transparent answers to these questions would go a long way towards your journey, and I think it's important to notice recurring themes in people's reactions, and consider what's amiss, and what it'd take for your product to be more likeable. Sounds as if you've seen something shady, inelegant, nontransparent, amiss or unlikeable in your observation of me and my work and you think it recurs? I suppose the idea of a browser does rouse people’s suspicions about privacy. A browser is a personal garment you wear very close to your skin. It is unusual to outsource that to anyone. Completely understandable concern. And however people come to the idea of shady, amiss, unlikeable, untransparent, I guess it’s possible for them to form those opinions. The confusion over what the project is, over all the licenses, even the name. The feeling of betrayed expectations when we changed the licenses. It’s natural that people will get confused, even angry, and it's understandable. And I suppose it’s inevitable that some people will form really negative opinions, out of a cautious suspicion, and maybe even anger that they feel they can't get something for free now, and so on. It’s understandable. It's unfortunate, but I mean, it's not a straight line. This is hard work to make something like this. And it's not easy to make the process itself look so neat, especially when you work in the open, and all your decisions and revisions of your perspective are there in the record. It's not a straight line. What can I say? I'm not perfect. But I don't pretend to be. It's a work in progress. Is that so hard to accept? I get if you want to read something bad into all this. Maybe you've got something against me. Maybe you're friends with people who feel angry it's not free anymore. I don't know. So I get if you want to read something bad into all this, from your own mind. But that's not about me. Where do you draw the line? Reality and perception, how are you so sure? I know you started with some compliments and questions about my reasons for working on this so let's end there: I think in the future every browser will be streaming. There's a trend towards fatter servers that AI is just 1 part of. Bandwidth only gets better, and experiences will evolve ever richer, with VR. Interactive video will become normal, and this browser is like the first interactive "streaming video" application that's not a game, and not just a blackbox desktop portal. I also think that by taking this "impermeable" ubiquitous tool, and opening it up through programmability and virtualization into something you can customize and build anything atop of, you open up so many new experiences. My main reason to build this at the start was I was doing web scraping projects for a client, and I wanted a better way to reduce repetitive work. So I started dreaming of what the best version of that tool would look like: and it wouldn't be a chrome extension, or a downloadable app. It would just work in the browser, without a download. But iframe's couldn't do it, and Chrome packaged apps (with their Webview) tag were going away (and never I think on mobile anyway). So slowly this idea evolved. At some point I realized (around the time of the Gartner report), that a "remote browser" was a product layer in its own right. So, since that time I've been working to perfect that layer, both as its own layer, and as a foundation for future work. Necessarily, I've gotten into cybersecurity, which necessitates a focus on security and privacy. Thank you for this opportunity to shine some light in dark places and flush out some cobwebs! Hahaha :)
peter_d_sherman 3y ago
Remote Browser Embeddable In A Web Page As A Service (RBEIAWPaaS) - Nice!
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Hahaha! :) What a mouthful. Yeah we will add an API in future based on this. So it truly will be RBEIAWPaaS hahahaha :)
keepamovin 3y ago
Hey HN! We've been at the drawing board, building a lot of custom scaling and deployment systems for clients using our remote browser tech, and felt the urge to create something reusable, yet flexible enough for various applications. So, that's CloudTabs - our take on blending browser isolation tech with a scalable, load-balancing framework. It's designed to be auto-scalable, primarily bounded by the limits of your infrastructure provider's API: add a server + hostname, run the install, add the hostname to the list, and boom - you are good to go! We're all about customization, and generalization and have made it a breeze to tailor CloudTabs for specific needs. CloudTabs deployments will be available for all licensing customers going forward, as the quickstart template on which we can build our collab. CloudTabs is essentially a plug-and-play system aiming to streamline the setup for SaaS, APIs, or any web-based service, fostering quicker custom deployments at a lower cost. While the browser component is openly available on GitHub as BrowserBox, CloudTabs itself will remain under wraps for now. But, this is just the beginning. We're gearing up to launch a developer API, annointing you with the awesome power to wield CloudTabs with just an API key. Over the last 72 hours we did around 900,000 browser minutes. Regarding the demo we have open at the link, think of it like an online version of an 'internet cafe', offering a free hour to kick the tires. Thanks to the overwhelming response here on Hacker News - 15,000 browser sessions in just a few days - we've been able to fine-tune the system under load, making it more robust. Curious? Swing by, take it for a spin, and feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback. We're just an email away and always happy to engage: hello@dosyago.com :) Cheers to innovation and community feedback that pushes us to excel!
theogravity 3y ago
Our product, Switchboard, also has this feature but it's part of a larger collaborative experience where you can share the browsers (yes multiple on the canvas) with other users in the same workspace: https://www.switchboard.app/ https://www.switchboard.app/ Note: We only support Chrome-based browsers at the moment. This will hopefully change this year.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Interesting. Thanks for posting! I like your website aesthetic. It looks to be using webviews in Electron and maybe synced using a custom chrome extension / content script, which would make it more of a HTML DOM mirroring approach, rather than streaming the pixels.
  - theogravity 3y ago
    Electron is just a wrapper around the web app. You can use Switchboard from your own web browser without it. We have our own proprietary cloud browser platform that we created from the ground up. The browsers are full-fledged browsers that can do anything a normal browser can do (some exceptions apply but generally not an issue for web apps that businesses tend to use) including watching youtube or netflix.
    - keepamovin 3y ago
      Impressive!! It's good to know, because I've had many customers think there are not many vendors in this case. I will be sure to refer some business your way totally gratis if you are okay with that? Anyway, happy to connect with your team if you like: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cris-dosyago/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/cris-dosyago/
      - theogravity 3y ago
        Of course! Really appreciated. Did you work on the browser platform yourself?

67 points by keepamovin 3y ago

Takennickname 3y ago

Very cool. But what for?

zb3 3y ago
Blocking ad-blockers
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
To make sure users have no agency over your site. The screen is just a bunch of pixels being streamed at you, no extensions, no view source, no agency. The purpose is to use web tech, without having to actually expose your site to the internet for real.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Could be useful for security isolation - browse any site you want, and if it manages to escape the browser sandbox it still doesn't get your real machine. Also could reduce the resources used locally; browsers with a lot of tabs are a RAM hog.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
keepamovin 3y ago
Adding to what the other comments say you can also: - whack it on a "Web Desktop"! See an example of it embedded here: https://puter.com/app/cloudtabs-browserbox https://puter.com/app/cloudtabs-browserbox - share the browser with other people (right click the "Browser" link from your signed in portal to copy that link then share it!) for real time collaboration in technical support, education, training, UI development, etc - use it to connect to an automation script / puppeteer robot to have a "human in the loop" intervention for solving a Captcha, or helping diagnose an issue, getting it unstuck - use it to capture replayable action sequences and screencasts for bug replay - use it to access devtools from a mobile device - use it to remotely view PDFs, DOCX, and explore archive formats - and many other creative uses from embedding a <BrowserView> in a webpage. We will provide a real API later, like: <script async src="...."></script> <cloudtabs-browser publishable-key="pk_live_..."></cloudtabs-browser>
mrbluecoat 3y ago
*cough* accessing blocked sites at work *cough*
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- keepamovin 3y ago
  That too. Hahaha! :)

peterleiser 3y ago

Use Case: As a dog I want to chase my tail so that I can see what happens. Issue: CloudTabs Web Browser locks up and does not respond to further input. Steps to reproduce: 1. On Android smartphone using Chrome browser, visit CloudTabs Web Browser. 2. Within CloudTabs Browser search for Hacker News on DuckDuckGo. 3. Click on link to Hacker News. 4. Find post about CloudTabs Web Browser and click on it. 5. CloudTabs Web Browser starts loading but does not finish and locks up.

keepamovin 3y ago
Hahaha Thanks! Normally that works. Probably just because there's right now hundreds of sessions simultaneously that it is timing out. Back on the front page, eh? For reference I've included a photo of such a scenario created by one of our "expert dogs": https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/816 https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/816 Perhaps fellow tail chasers out there can enjoy vicariously...at least until the load dies down!!
- peterleiser 3y ago
  Love the "Loopback" photo! Very cool product, nice work!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ttul 3y ago

Cloudflare acquired a startup from Seattle that took this idea to its logical conclusion: streaming the DOM itself from the remote browser to provide full browser isolation without compromising rendering quality or speed. It would be nice if such a thing existed as open source, as it’s now buried in their security suite never to see the light of day for most of us.

keepamovin 3y ago
Is that right? Could be a recent acquire if it's DOM mirroring. I heard CF acquired S2 a few years ago, and what S2 did is they created a WebAssembly binary that composited the browser SKIA draw instructions on the client, and streamed the SKIA draw instructions from the server. Not without its issues, but certainly useful. What we do is just stream pixels to the client. Yes it's expensive in terms of bandwidth, relatively. But the advantage is simplicity. And with a close server and bandwidth trending faster and cheaper, with the increasing drive to video consumption across media, I don't see bandwidth as an issue. If you're interested, our code is on GitHub: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox If MailChannels is interested in integrating safe attachment / link opening, we could probably figure something out.
- internetter 3y ago
  > I don't see bandwidth as an issue. The issue is latency
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    That's why close servers are important. Streaming the SKIA instructions will have the same latency issue as streaming pixels. Something changes on the server, and the change is propagated over the network. Even with DOM mirroring (notoriously buggy), changes need to be synced between remote and local. Regarding latency and CloudTabs specifically: we have 7 regions right now and will put up an 8th in Canada (Canada's second, why so popular there, idk). Our latency is good. Responsive, below a perceptible level. For interactive real-time streaming video it's good. Are you experiencing issues? Do you mind me asking what region you connected to?

sillycube 3y ago

[dead]

zb3 3y ago

This is how websites might be built in the future with the goal of making ad blocking / tracking protection much harder...

keepamovin 3y ago
That's an interesting idea. Never thought of that. If the website is rendered on the server, extensions become useless! Wow, now I get the concept that many customers came to me with, but were too shy to reveal. I always thought they were doing this kind of reverse proxy for IP protection, but now I see the bigger picture. Haha! :) Thank you for your insight.

already 3y ago

[dead]

saurik 3y ago

After "Browser Loaded", how long must I wait for something else to happen? (iOS 17.4, btw)

keepamovin 3y ago
Sorry, the service are now at like 100% load. This is getting quite a hit. If you get a delay there, you can try reloading. I’ll try adding some more servers if we’re going to be on the front page. I’m bringing up a new server in the US region now. Should be 10 minutes, hopefully will soak up the load
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

xiekomb 3y ago

Remote Browser Isolation is interesting for several use cases. Your demo unfortunately does not work on iOS

jtbayly 3y ago
Running latest iOS seemed to work for me.
keepamovin 3y ago
Oh! It should work. What doesn’t work? I’m testing it on iOS all the time. Which version are you?

amaccuish 3y ago

Reminds me of BlackBerry and Opera, which used to do similar things (server-side rendering) on mobile to use less data.

keepamovin 3y ago
Thank you! That is such a compliment. BlackBerry was awesome, and it sounds like Opera was so innovative. Although this would probably use more data! Unless you were browsing, say, a very non interactive page that weighed a lot.

keepamovin 3y ago

Ok a new server in US region is up. Unfortunately the disk filled up on the Europe server and Canadian server. I had to nuke all the Ephemeral sessions. Capability should be back now. OS told me disk was 100.0% used when I logged in. It was all tempfs mounted for each user. I never realized its importance. Will need bigger disks. I'll add some timed updates to keep things organized below this point: 17:57:00 Z Will add 2 new 32 core servers in Europe, and Asia, as both those regions are seeing lots of demand. Asia is at 100% right now. 18:03:00 Z Just started creation of the Japan server. Once I get the install script started, I'll move to create the Europe one. 18:18:00 Z Okay, Japan server should be online. Sorry about everybody in SEA that I just nuked your sessions, that must have sucked. The server was hard to manage at 100% utilization. Moving to create a new Europe server now. 18:26:00 Z Okay Europe server is provisioned and setup is starting now. It should be live in about 10 minutes. 18:32:00 Z London server is live. Stats update: since posting to HN 2 hours ago we had about 2000 sessions across (initially) 4 16core 32GB 128disk servers. So far have had to add 3 more 32/64/1TB servers, with disk being the unexpected cost to this type of load. BTW if anyone is reading this how was your experience? Was it slow/fast? Responsive? What region were you in? 18:42:00 Z I'm monitoring the 7 servers now. 18:48:00 Z Right now server selection is based on RTT/ping from client. I'm thinking it might be good to have ping endpoint include the current load. But I don't want to bork it. 19:31:00 Z Okay, load average has been added to the ping check for fastest server. We now pick between the fastest two pings based on which has the lowest load. Should work well.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

Is there an about page I'm missing? Or somewhere to see pricing info, or... anything that's not the actual app? (Regardless, it's cool, and does in fact seem to work pretty well)

keepamovin 3y ago
Here you go! https://browse.cloudtabs.net/about-everything https://browse.cloudtabs.net/about-everything Folks the servers are all running at 100% load right now. If you like you can check back later, or if you want to be reminded you may leave your email address in this Google Form and we'll send you a reminder when it quiets down a bit! https://forms.gle/ToZWygdRnWAob9sp7 https://forms.gle/ToZWygdRnWAob9sp7
riedel 3y ago
The ToS links this: https://dosyago.com/ https://dosyago.com/
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I saw, but that seems to be a different thing? I was assuming that was the actual underlying software, not this service
keepamovin 3y ago
Click on "CloudTabs Home" from the browser to get taken to the Signup area. Inside there it's a normal basic "SaaS" looking app profile with: - My Plan (pricing info and subscribe / manage) - About (including roadmap / impressum) - Settings (for now just the home page!) etc :)
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I'm not fond of having to create an account in order to see information about the product, especially pricing. (Yes, I understand that creating an account doesn't take money, but that doesn't make it a zero-cost action)

thatha7777 3y ago

[flagged]

keepamovin 3y ago
Hey Ian We don't know each other and I wasn't aware you were interested. I don't think you've reached out to me before. It sounds like you have a very negative impression of me and my work, and I'm sure it seems like a lot of people have that. I'm sorry for getting the Gumroad capitalization wrong: I've changed that Gumroad to the correct one. I think it's understandable that people can get confused so let's bring some clarity to that. I'll deal with the linked comments first? But I'll add more in edits https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490389 - The difficulty in ELI5: It is hard, because it's like "What can you build with a browser you can embed". Sort of like anything. From your days in YC, you may be connected to another recent YC company also offering embeddable multiplayer browsers. The possibilities are endless. See my other comments in this thread for ideas. - The belief that BrowserBox is a rip off of ViewFinderJS ( I assume that's what "to MuleSoft" something means). Actually, ViewFinderJS was a name I gave the project at one point in the past, because it's like a viewfinder, and I like photography. But I thought the name wasn't as clear as something else. So I basically just changed the name whenever I came up with a better one. Kind of like "open creative process" or "showing my work". Just change to the better name whenever I had one. Some other names in the past were: Zanj, BrowserGap. You can think of CloudTabs as an application of the BrowserBox technology! I understand the succession of names can be confusing but I Just wanted to arrive at the best one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495911 - That is quite a lot of research. Someone really spent some time looking into all the licenses of the past. I was surprised why they didn't just email me: suddenly this research appears on my thread from someone I've never heard from before. Again, it's like the names: I just changed it when I thought I could have a better license. I felt ripped off by open source licenses, and people's sense of entitlement. I felt I'd been duped into using OSS licenses, but people didn't care about me or my work, they just wanted something for themselves. I didn't understand licenses at first. And then I started to get a picture, still within the "dogma" of OSS, and I thought AGPL. But in the end I just realized OSS is not a good fit for something which is a comprehensive product like BrowserBox is (better fit for a component). And at different points I'd read something and think, "Oh, that's the good license" and kind of get excited about it and put it in there, and then change it later. More just like an artistic process. Repainting / reworking. Maybe you can say it's not ideal from a license point of view, but...like, I don't really care. We put in a lot of work on this. And I want to capture the rewards of that. OSS licenses were getting in the way here, so they had to go. But I went through a process of thinking maybe there was a better option in OSS, but turns out there wasn't. I imagine some people are pissed off that they can't get that tech for free. I thought people would pay even if it was OSS, but people are not like that. I'm not worried about the earlier work: it's just like a contribution to the community. We put in so much work since then, people can't take that. At the end of the day, if people want to license our technology, they can just deal with us transparently, in the open, and pay. If it's so valuable, of course they will. And if you're an individual or non-profit, there's the non-commercial option. What else was there? > I think finding an elegant (and not shady) way of providing clear, transparent answers to these questions would go a long way towards your journey, and I think it's important to notice recurring themes in people's reactions, and consider what's amiss, and what it'd take for your product to be more likeable. Sounds as if you've seen something shady, inelegant, nontransparent, amiss or unlikeable in your observation of me and my work and you think it recurs? I suppose the idea of a browser does rouse people’s suspicions about privacy. A browser is a personal garment you wear very close to your skin. It is unusual to outsource that to anyone. Completely understandable concern. And however people come to the idea of shady, amiss, unlikeable, untransparent, I guess it’s possible for them to form those opinions. The confusion over what the project is, over all the licenses, even the name. The feeling of betrayed expectations when we changed the licenses. It’s natural that people will get confused, even angry, and it's understandable. And I suppose it’s inevitable that some people will form really negative opinions, out of a cautious suspicion, and maybe even anger that they feel they can't get something for free now, and so on. It’s understandable. It's unfortunate, but I mean, it's not a straight line. This is hard work to make something like this. And it's not easy to make the process itself look so neat, especially when you work in the open, and all your decisions and revisions of your perspective are there in the record. It's not a straight line. What can I say? I'm not perfect. But I don't pretend to be. It's a work in progress. Is that so hard to accept? I get if you want to read something bad into all this. Maybe you've got something against me. Maybe you're friends with people who feel angry it's not free anymore. I don't know. So I get if you want to read something bad into all this, from your own mind. But that's not about me. Where do you draw the line? Reality and perception, how are you so sure? I know you started with some compliments and questions about my reasons for working on this so let's end there: I think in the future every browser will be streaming. There's a trend towards fatter servers that AI is just 1 part of. Bandwidth only gets better, and experiences will evolve ever richer, with VR. Interactive video will become normal, and this browser is like the first interactive "streaming video" application that's not a game, and not just a blackbox desktop portal. I also think that by taking this "impermeable" ubiquitous tool, and opening it up through programmability and virtualization into something you can customize and build anything atop of, you open up so many new experiences. My main reason to build this at the start was I was doing web scraping projects for a client, and I wanted a better way to reduce repetitive work. So I started dreaming of what the best version of that tool would look like: and it wouldn't be a chrome extension, or a downloadable app. It would just work in the browser, without a download. But iframe's couldn't do it, and Chrome packaged apps (with their Webview) tag were going away (and never I think on mobile anyway). So slowly this idea evolved. At some point I realized (around the time of the Gartner report), that a "remote browser" was a product layer in its own right. So, since that time I've been working to perfect that layer, both as its own layer, and as a foundation for future work. Necessarily, I've gotten into cybersecurity, which necessitates a focus on security and privacy. Thank you for this opportunity to shine some light in dark places and flush out some cobwebs! Hahaha :)

peter_d_sherman 3y ago

Remote Browser Embeddable In A Web Page As A Service (RBEIAWPaaS) - Nice!

keepamovin 3y ago
Hahaha! :) What a mouthful. Yeah we will add an API in future based on this. So it truly will be RBEIAWPaaS hahahaha :)

keepamovin 3y ago

Hey HN! We've been at the drawing board, building a lot of custom scaling and deployment systems for clients using our remote browser tech, and felt the urge to create something reusable, yet flexible enough for various applications. So, that's CloudTabs - our take on blending browser isolation tech with a scalable, load-balancing framework. It's designed to be auto-scalable, primarily bounded by the limits of your infrastructure provider's API: add a server + hostname, run the install, add the hostname to the list, and boom - you are good to go! We're all about customization, and generalization and have made it a breeze to tailor CloudTabs for specific needs. CloudTabs deployments will be available for all licensing customers going forward, as the quickstart template on which we can build our collab. CloudTabs is essentially a plug-and-play system aiming to streamline the setup for SaaS, APIs, or any web-based service, fostering quicker custom deployments at a lower cost. While the browser component is openly available on GitHub as BrowserBox, CloudTabs itself will remain under wraps for now. But, this is just the beginning. We're gearing up to launch a developer API, annointing you with the awesome power to wield CloudTabs with just an API key. Over the last 72 hours we did around 900,000 browser minutes. Regarding the demo we have open at the link, think of it like an online version of an 'internet cafe', offering a free hour to kick the tires. Thanks to the overwhelming response here on Hacker News - 15,000 browser sessions in just a few days - we've been able to fine-tune the system under load, making it more robust. Curious? Swing by, take it for a spin, and feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback. We're just an email away and always happy to engage: hello@dosyago.com :) Cheers to innovation and community feedback that pushes us to excel!

theogravity 3y ago

Our product, Switchboard, also has this feature but it's part of a larger collaborative experience where you can share the browsers (yes multiple on the canvas) with other users in the same workspace: https://www.switchboard.app/ https://www.switchboard.app/ Note: We only support Chrome-based browsers at the moment. This will hopefully change this year.

keepamovin 3y ago
Interesting. Thanks for posting! I like your website aesthetic. It looks to be using webviews in Electron and maybe synced using a custom chrome extension / content script, which would make it more of a HTML DOM mirroring approach, rather than streaming the pixels.
- theogravity 3y ago
  Electron is just a wrapper around the web app. You can use Switchboard from your own web browser without it. We have our own proprietary cloud browser platform that we created from the ground up. The browsers are full-fledged browsers that can do anything a normal browser can do (some exceptions apply but generally not an issue for web apps that businesses tend to use) including watching youtube or netflix.
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Impressive!! It's good to know, because I've had many customers think there are not many vendors in this case. I will be sure to refer some business your way totally gratis if you are okay with that? Anyway, happy to connect with your team if you like: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cris-dosyago/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/cris-dosyago/
    - theogravity 3y ago
      Of course! Really appreciated. Did you work on the browser platform yourself?