Brow6el: A full-featured web browser for the terminal using Chromium

Posted by nerdypepper 1 day ago

Comments

I just don't understand...what is the use case of this? I thought it would be something that cleverly renders text without style in a minimalist-browser sort of way. But this just literally...shows you the web page...in the CLI? I'm confused.

Comment by jadbox 1 day ago

You could terminal into a remote machine terminal and use a web browser in the tty without needing an X11 windowing support.

Comment by angeldimitrov94 1 day ago

Struggling to see the reasoning behind why you would need to do this if you are remoting into a machine, meaning you have a real machine that you can just open a browser in. Seems more like a solution looking for a problem to me.

There's never been a situation in which I wished I had a browser like this in the CLI.

There have been situations in which I wish I could just get a simplified text version of any site without the styling, but I never once wished I could see the actual full site in all its glory in the CLI.

Comment by reddit_clone 1 day ago

Unless you have x-forwarding (and an X server running locally) or VNC you can't really use a graphical browser remotely yes?

This lets you use it from plain SSH connection?

Comment by jpc0 21 hours ago

In what situation do you need to do that is what the previous commenter qas getting at.

If you want a graphical browser just open it locally...

Comment by westurner 1 day ago

I don't think any of these text-based web browsers are actively maintained;

"Show HN: Browsh – A modern, text-based browser" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17487552

browsh-org/browsh: A fully-modern text-based browser, rendering to TTY and browsers https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh

"Forking Chrome to render in a terminal" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34547259

fathyb/carbonyl: Chromium running inside your terminal https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

chawan: TUI Web Browser https://sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/

Ladybird browser may be easier to build a TUI terminal user interface for than other brothers because of Lagom FWIU (LibWeb and LibJs are already decoupled from the UI and rendering)

Comment by shiomiru 1 day ago

I can't speak for the other projects you listed, but at least chawan is actively maintained by yours truly.

Comment by westurner 1 day ago

My mistake! Lynx and elinks still work but don't exec JS or WASM.

Cloudflare Browser Isolation runs part of the browser in the cloud, which might work for TUIs ..

Research open source solutions for self-hosting remote browser isolation;

Like these browser isolation Chrome extensions: https://www.legba.app/blog/best-browser-isolation-extensions...

And these:

RBI: remote-browser-isolation · GitHub Topics https://github.com/topics/remote-browser-isolation?o=asc&s=u...

Cloudflare Browser Rendering REST API https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/rest-api... says 10/min day free (which is probably enough for an open source project that needs to run screenshots at various resolutions on a few builds per day)

But then there's this, which currently only execs partial js:

  elinks -dump -no-references -dump-width 79

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h 1 day ago

> WARNING: Kitty image support (currently only in main branch builds) by its design nature is barelly usable in SSH when brow6el runs on remote host, this feature is usable when brow6el is executed on localhost. On ssh the responsivenes of browser is significantly affected, due to massive data transfers on each frame rendered

But it's fine in the default Sixel?

Comment by tim-projects 1 day ago

I don't like the name. Can suggest renaming to insane browser because this is actually insane in a good way. :)

What happens if you run it in a TTY ? Does it fail to render anything?

Comment by zarski 1 day ago

Can Brow6el work as expected within a Docker container?

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by leephillips 1 day ago

Why were your projects no longer welcomed at Codeberg?

Comment by jdiff 1 day ago

Codeberg recently changed policy to not allow primarily AI-authored projects.

Comment by leephillips 1 day ago

Oh, I see. Well I won’t be installing this then.

Comment by CaptainFever 1 day ago

> Why were your projects no longer welcomed at Codeberg?

> Oh, I see. Well I won’t be installing this then.

> Very illuminating.

Man, talk about anti-social. What a bad faith question. It feels like you've already made up your mind on this. Were you actually looking for an answer, or just looking for an argument?

Comment by jdiff 1 day ago

If you were interested, check out Browsh. It's a similar project but based on Firefox and it's been around for quite some time now.

Comment by GaryBluto 1 day ago

OK?

Comment by mzs 1 day ago

"This reporitory [https://tangled.org/janantos.tngl.sh/brow6el] is now the main and only source of truth, previous on Codeberg [https://codeberg.org/janantos/brow6el] is kept for referrence only. I have decided to migrated from Codeberg because of my other projects are not welcomed there anymore and I want to keep my projects together on single platform."

Comment by leephillips 1 day ago

Very illuminating.