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 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.
Heya, 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...
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 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