Show HN: BrowserFace – Embeddable Chrome Front end. Connect to browser remotely | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: BrowserFace – Embeddable Chrome Front end. Connect to browser remotely

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4 pointsbrowserface6 comments

This is so awesome! I’ve been looking for something like this for a “user testing” use case

Thanks, I'm really glad you thought it was awesome. Sorry for the questions but I think you could have some really useful feedback. What do you mean by user testing? what would you find particularly useful?

I've been told to do a bug replay feature to record exactly what a user tried to do and what went wrong.

Not sure if I'm going to build this yet, but I was looking into building a tool that let product designers/managers easily ask customers/user testers to record themselves trying to complete various tasks on a website.

e.g. "go to amazon.com and add an item to your wishlist"

I wanted to see if it was possible to make it so the tester didn't have to install/download anything. It is possible in modern browsers with WebRTC, but it's kinda clunky and doesn't work on mobile/Safari. A "cloud browser" was a solution I looked into a bit, but it seemed too complex for me to try implement on my own, which is why I'm excited to see this exist. Again, I'm not sure I'll end up working on this, so my feedback probably isn't useful, but I'm happy to give it anyway.

Another possible use case is recording for customer support (I run screenjar.com which uses WebRTC for this), but the main issue for this use case is customers would have to log in on the cloud browser which isn't ideal in terms of usability as well as security.

Thanks for those ideas, that's super useful. And Screenjar looks awesome! The not working on mobile issue is a reason I wanted to build this so it can be delivered everywhere.

About sessions:

How would clients feel about providing a "login link" for their support customers to login (that is single use and wouldn't expose credentials), and could even be tied to whitelisted IPs for the service?

I've thought about this as well, I don't know if there's an easy solution to get around having people login. Of course if they already have an specific extension installed you could "transfer" the session cookies to the remote browser, but again this is not great for security-appearance. It's easy enough to discard the credentials or provide guarantees they are redacted from recordings but I suppose it depends on how clients and their customers view it.

The "login link" makes sense, it would just require more upfront work/dev time from clients. I honestly don't know much about what people would be willing to put up with as Screenjar is super early-stage. I'm just excited that this exists as it's another option to explore when coming across these types of use cases.

Okay cool thanks

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