Show HN: Live multiplayer web browsing chaos | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Live multiplayer web browsing chaos

comebrowsewithme.com

6 pointsgraderjs10 comments

Normally the connection limit is 5 people for the demo. But I created this one and opened it up to 500. I want to see what happens.

If you want your own private one to share with anyone you give the invite to, go to:

https://comebrowsewithme.com

to create a free invite for ~15 minute session for up to 5 people.

Use cases for this include:

- Training and support for web applications and websites

- Product demonstrations

- Interactive browser screen sharing for meetings

- Watching movies together

- Strange new fun games

- Purchasing a set of items together, "group shopping"

Fwiw, the title is a little misleading. It should actually be "shared remote browser sessions over WebRTC, falling back to WebSocket where unavilable", and include the asterisk that WebRTC is only used as a data channel between the remote server and your browser, a faster UDP/SCTP way to send viewport frames. It's not a p2p "browser mesh" as cool as that might be. The browser runs headless on a remote server, and people connect to it.

Some things on my todo list:

- cookies on audio endpoint (anyone can actually connect to any remote browser's audio out, AUDIO IS NOT SECURE, but all other endpoints and sockets are protected by authentication)

- add participants count

- add payment for sessions of longer than 15 minutes or greater than 5 people

for those interested, the browser part is mostly public domain open-source at: https://github.com/i5ik/ViewFinderJS I say mostly because the product versions contain secret sauce, magic and enhancements not in the public domain version.

Also now on my to-do list:

- handle screen resize "jank" (resize squabbling) from multiple people with different screen sizes connecting) ;)

For a minute I put "https://comebrowsewithme.com:8002/" in one of the browser tabs and the ui started slowing down until it was unusable - I couldn't help myself :P

This is really cool. Did you use any multiplayer library to build this?

Thank you. No it's all hand built from the ground up. Except i do use simplepeer for webrtc, and ws on the server for websockets.

Quite cool

Thank you! :)

Ya interesting idea. I played a video with the perfect strangers theme song and intro. I couldn’t tell if anyone was watching with me and the audio didn’t come through any suggestions?

Hey, cool song choice! :) Sorry audio will not work on this 8002 port demo, but audio works fine if you go to https://comebrowsewithme.com create a meeting and send the invite to people. Honestly I don't know why that is. As for not knowing if anyone is watching with you, on my todo list is add a participant count. There's also a chat tab in the menu at right that I want to surface.

Cool. Ya, that is a great theme. Thanks for the feedback, and good luck with the iteration.

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