Oh THAT way round, that's super cool!
I was thinking the other way.. "See what that stinking pile of javascript and css looks like in Mosaic", but, this is actually useful! :D
Yeah, same confusion here. First example, being HN added to the confusion, since HN seems like exactly the kind of site that would render fine on a thirty year old browser (not meant as a swipe in any way - HN does one thing and it does it well).
As the Readme notes, a similar project is the Web Rendering Proxy (WRP) - https://github.com/tenox7/wrp, however the two projects differ in their use (or lack of) JavaScript:
> This idea of using a proxy to render the browser view into images has been used before by WRP (Web Rendering proxy). Browservice differs from WRP in that it uses JavaScript on the client browser to animate the browser view and gather user input events, while in WRP, the user has to use web forms and image maps to provide the input, and the page has to be reloaded for every update in the view. Thus Browservice gives the user a more immersive web browsing experience, but also requires a newer client browser and more powerful hardware. While WRP can run on browsers as old as NCSA Mosaic 2.0, the earliest supported client browsers for Browservice are from late 90s and early 00s.
My OS of choice is OS X 10.9 "Mavericks". It's not old enough to be "Retro" yet, but I want to stay here for a while, and Firefox says they're dropping support in a year. And while there are a bunch of alternatives browsers I can move to (ArcticFox, Unofficial Intel Builds of TenFourFox, etc), they don't always work with every website.
So, one long-term possibility I'm toying with is using OS X's implementation of X11. I could run Firefox in a modern Linux distro (probably a VM on the same machine, although it could be a different machine), and use X Forwarding to make it appear as a normal app. I think this should theoretically work for a lot of OS's, from the earliest versions of OS X to decade-old copies of Linux.
I tried it. Performance was awful with the standard XQuartz client, especially scrolling, so I tried some alternatives: TigerVNC, X2Go, NoMachine, RDP. NoMachine had the best performance by far, RDP was decent. VNC and X2Go were too fiddly to setup for my.
Even with NoMachine the overall experience was clearly much worse than a native browser (mostly due to worse trackpad-scrolling).
Aw, that's disappointing! This was over wired lan?
I'm very surprised that standard render-remotely-and-send-pixels software was more effective than X forwarding, where the drawing is still done locally.
This reminds me of Opera Mini (not the same as Opera Mobile).
It server-side rendered pages (on Opera servers), and converted them to a lightweight HTML page (with OPML extension IIRC), and then sent to the browser.
I presume the server costs were high, because you run a giant proxy that did a lot of things for users, but for end users, it meant semi-interactice web pages that were 10-15kb in size.
Opera Mini still exists. I guess it's not very commonly used nowadays in terms of market share, but on the other hand, individual web pages are much heavier and require more processing nowadays.
Something somewhat related is Mighty by Suhail Doshi, cofounder of Mixpanel and eventually pushed out from the CEO position, but that's irrelevant. Mighty is Chrome but prerendered on some powerful machine. Sounds like a parody but it isn't.
This is delightful! As someone who really, really liked Win2000 before switching to Mac, getting to browse the web on an NT/IE6 is a wonderful nostalgia trip (especially when you know it's simulation of sorts).
I’ll try this on my iPad first generation, it’s a bit sad to see the device being responsive but pretty much useless, without iCloud support, hard to find iOS 5 apps
Not entirely sure of the architecture of this app, after a quick look. Using CEF and C++, with a client and a proxy. But where does the CEF sit, and how is it controlled by the client?
I made something similar in Node.JS using headless Chrome, that targets mobile and desktop browsers. The "proxy" runs anywhere, and a client (that runs in the web browser) connects using Remote Debugging Protocol[0], passing along the user interaction intents by converting them to the wire protocol of RDP. The remote browser server then, like this project ( I think ), passes back pixels from screenshots of the rendered web.
It's a safe but not particularly fast way to do it. MightyApp[2] are doing some sort of MP4 streaming of a remote browser, for speed, I think.
I like the retrocomputing focus of this, and the screenshots and image of the modern web running on an old ThinkPad like machine look really awesome. The focus of my project[1] was more an open-source remote isolated browser, for security, and automation uses.
