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Comment by sergiomattei | Hacker News Reader

Can someone ELI5 this project?

It looks to be an implementation of "browser in a browser". Originally the project seemed to handle usually unsupported apps, like IMAP clients in the browser. I assume they have a server running, and JS libraries that act as a shim for IMAP et al control via websockets. Also appears to create usable web-based proxies for modern security-controlled websites which would break on legacy web-proxy methods.

Ah, it looks like they've MuleSoft'd ViewFinderJS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28015601

Add the most requested features to a commercial offering.

Sounds like it’s VNC centered around a remote browser, that loads in your own browser.

It has extra features and fewer limitations than a regular browser I suppose, but that’s what I gather.

You can control a remote Chrome browser located on a remote computer (eg: VPS on the cloud) from your own Chrome browser.

Maybe I'm being obtuse here, but isn't that was Selenium does? How is this different?

Not obtuse at all! It’s actually not so easy to describe what this is and it took us a while to come up with correct language, and understanding of how to express it even after we knew what it was and had built it: it took us some time to figure out how to communicate that.

To answer you: I believe these instrumentation/automation protocols/methods like Selenium/W3C WebDriver Protocol/Remote Debugger Protocol, do not themselves provide user interfaces for controlling their functions, but rather expose APIs.

BrowserBox itself uses such a protocol under the hood, but also provides a user interface (that funnily enough looks like a regular browser~~because I wasn’t creative enough to invent a better set of UX interactions/affordances than those already expressed in regular web browser, heh :)).

In effect, BrowserBox turns the browser experience into a client server application. And BrowserBox is to those instrumentation/automation APIs, as a front end Client is to a Web application API.

That’s a slight simplification because BrowserBox contains a significant server component, however, it’s a useful way to think about it.

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