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Comment by mathgenius | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone built a WaaS yet ? (Web-browser as a service.)

Sauce Labs and BrowserStack have been in that space for quite a while now.

2008 for Sauce Labs, to be precise. Before that, BrowserCam (founded in 2002, acquired by Gomez in 2007) was part of my inspiration for Sauce Labs. BrowserCam was one of the first screenshots-as-a-service sites. The only thing it was missing was Selenium support for end-to-end test automation. :-)

I think if done right there would be a market (if this is actually the right direction and useful is another question).

wbaas.io "web browser as a service"

Support like say the 5 major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, ...), provide an API and charge like ~xx euro/month.

The biggest challenge is probably to make it secure as one builds in essence a DOS proxy?

That's what TestingBot offers; a cloud of browsers to run automated tests. Pricing depends on test duration and concurrency.

We secure all VMs with a firewall, every test runs on a new VM which gets destroyed after the test.

There totally is a market for it. Sauce Labs makes $25MM/year doing it. One way to secure the service is by using pristine virtual machines for each session and discarding them afterwards.

Like browsershots?

Came in to say exactly this. The funny thing is that someone HAS created browser as a service XD

TestingBot.com has been offering this service (Automated/Manual testing) via Selenium since 2011

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