Show HN: CloudTabs Web Browser – a streaming web browser on every website | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CloudTabs Web Browser – a streaming web browser on every website

browse.cloudtabs.net

67 pointskeepamovin49 comments

Cloudflare acquired a startup from Seattle that took this idea to its logical conclusion: streaming the DOM itself from the remote browser to provide full browser isolation without compromising rendering quality or speed. It would be nice if such a thing existed as open source, as it’s now buried in their security suite never to see the light of day for most of us.

Is that right? Could be a recent acquire if it's DOM mirroring.

I heard CF acquired S2 a few years ago, and what S2 did is they created a WebAssembly binary that composited the browser SKIA draw instructions on the client, and streamed the SKIA draw instructions from the server. Not without its issues, but certainly useful.

What we do is just stream pixels to the client. Yes it's expensive in terms of bandwidth, relatively. But the advantage is simplicity. And with a close server and bandwidth trending faster and cheaper, with the increasing drive to video consumption across media, I don't see bandwidth as an issue.

If you're interested, our code is on GitHub: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

If MailChannels is interested in integrating safe attachment / link opening, we could probably figure something out.

> I don't see bandwidth as an issue.

The issue is latency

That's why close servers are important.

Streaming the SKIA instructions will have the same latency issue as streaming pixels. Something changes on the server, and the change is propagated over the network. Even with DOM mirroring (notoriously buggy), changes need to be synced between remote and local.

Regarding latency and CloudTabs specifically: we have 7 regions right now and will put up an 8th in Canada (Canada's second, why so popular there, idk).

Our latency is good. Responsive, below a perceptible level. For interactive real-time streaming video it's good.

Are you experiencing issues? Do you mind me asking what region you connected to?

Yes, hardly anywhere close to a smooth experience. I live in Vermont, my internet is good enough to hit 4k if it tries hard enough.

Oh no! That sounds sucky, thanks for your feedback!

This will probably seem really annoying but would it be a bad idea for you to do a little screencast of this? Sorry for the bother but it would really help me out, because it would be good to gauge the precise degree.

We might need to put a server in US NE. That region is bare, but I thought it would be covered by LA, Texas or Central Canada.

Hey HN!

We've been at the drawing board, building a lot of custom scaling and deployment systems for clients using our remote browser tech, and felt the urge to create something reusable, yet flexible enough for various applications.

So, that's CloudTabs - our take on blending browser isolation tech with a scalable, load-balancing framework. It's designed to be auto-scalable, primarily bounded by the limits of your infrastructure provider's API: add a server + hostname, run the install, add the hostname to the list, and boom - you are good to go!

We're all about customization, and generalization and have made it a breeze to tailor CloudTabs for specific needs. CloudTabs deployments will be available for all licensing customers going forward, as the quickstart template on which we can build our collab.

CloudTabs is essentially a plug-and-play system aiming to streamline the setup for SaaS, APIs, or any web-based service, fostering quicker custom deployments at a lower cost. While the browser component is openly available on GitHub as BrowserBox, CloudTabs itself will remain under wraps for now. But, this is just the beginning.

We're gearing up to launch a developer API, annointing you with the awesome power to wield CloudTabs with just an API key. Over the last 72 hours we did around 900,000 browser minutes.

Regarding the demo we have open at the link, think of it like an online version of an 'internet cafe', offering a free hour to kick the tires.

Thanks to the overwhelming response here on Hacker News - 15,000 browser sessions in just a few days - we've been able to fine-tune the system under load, making it more robust.

Curious? Swing by, take it for a spin, and feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback. We're just an email away and always happy to engage: hello@dosyago.com :)

Cheers to innovation and community feedback that pushes us to excel!

Is there an about page I'm missing? Or somewhere to see pricing info, or... anything that's not the actual app?

(Regardless, it's cool, and does in fact seem to work pretty well)

The ToS links this: https://dosyago.com/

I saw, but that seems to be a different thing? I was assuming that was the actual underlying software, not this service

Click on "CloudTabs Home" from the browser to get taken to the Signup area. Inside there it's a normal basic "SaaS" looking app profile with:

- My Plan (pricing info and subscribe / manage)

- About (including roadmap / impressum)

- Settings (for now just the home page!)

etc

I'm not fond of having to create an account in order to see information about the product, especially pricing. (Yes, I understand that creating an account doesn't take money, but that doesn't make it a zero-cost action)

That's a fair point. It's just as simple single page (literally) SPA so one 'solution' is to just look at the HTML file.

But I'll post a link to the Stripe pricing table on a separate page for convenience (maybe just remove all the display: none) styles of the other SPA sections on a long scroll 'about everything' page. Good point! Wait a minute for a link...

edit: Here you go!

CloudTabs - About Everything: https://browse.cloudtabs.net/about-everything

That looks good:)

Here you go! https://browse.cloudtabs.net/about-everything

Folks the servers are all running at 100% load right now.

If you like you can check back later, or if you want to be reminded you may leave your email address in this Google Form and we'll send you a reminder when it quiets down a bit!

https://forms.gle/ToZWygdRnWAob9sp7

Very cool. But what for?

To make sure users have no agency over your site. The screen is just a bunch of pixels being streamed at you, no extensions, no view source, no agency. The purpose is to use web tech, without having to actually expose your site to the internet for real.

Could be useful for security isolation - browse any site you want, and if it manages to escape the browser sandbox it still doesn't get your real machine. Also could reduce the resources used locally; browsers with a lot of tabs are a RAM hog.

Adding to what the other comments say you can also:

- whack it on a "Web Desktop"! See an example of it embedded here: https://puter.com/app/cloudtabs-browserbox

- share the browser with other people (right click the "Browser" link from your signed in portal to copy that link then share it!) for real time collaboration in technical support, education, training, UI development, etc

- use it to connect to an automation script / puppeteer robot to have a "human in the loop" intervention for solving a Captcha, or helping diagnose an issue, getting it unstuck

- use it to capture replayable action sequences and screencasts for bug replay

- use it to access devtools from a mobile device

- use it to remotely view PDFs, DOCX, and explore archive formats

- and many other creative uses from embedding a <BrowserView> in a webpage.

We will provide a real API later, like:

  <script async src="...."></script>
  <cloudtabs-browser publishable-key="pk_live_..."></cloudtabs-browser>

*cough* accessing blocked sites at work *cough*

That too. Hahaha! :)

Blocking ad-blockers

This is how websites might be built in the future with the goal of making ad blocking / tracking protection much harder...

That's an interesting idea. Never thought of that. If the website is rendered on the server, extensions become useless! Wow, now I get the concept that many customers came to me with, but were too shy to reveal.

I always thought they were doing this kind of reverse proxy for IP protection, but now I see the bigger picture. Haha! :) Thank you for your insight.

After "Browser Loaded", how long must I wait for something else to happen? (iOS 17.4, btw)

Sorry, the service are now at like 100% load. This is getting quite a hit.

If you get a delay there, you can try reloading.

I’ll try adding some more servers if we’re going to be on the front page.

I’m bringing up a new server in the US region now. Should be 10 minutes, hopefully will soak up the load

Remote Browser Embeddable In A Web Page As A Service (RBEIAWPaaS) - Nice!

Hahaha! :) What a mouthful. Yeah we will add an API in future based on this. So it truly will be RBEIAWPaaS hahahaha :)

Reminds me of BlackBerry and Opera, which used to do similar things (server-side rendering) on mobile to use less data.

Thank you! That is such a compliment. BlackBerry was awesome, and it sounds like Opera was so innovative.

Although this would probably use more data! Unless you were browsing, say, a very non interactive page that weighed a lot.

Remote Browser Isolation is interesting for several use cases. Your demo unfortunately does not work on iOS

Oh! It should work. What doesn’t work? I’m testing it on iOS all the time.

Which version are you?

Running latest iOS seemed to work for me.

Our product, Switchboard, also has this feature but it's part of a larger collaborative experience where you can share the browsers (yes multiple on the canvas) with other users in the same workspace:

https://www.switchboard.app/

Note: We only support Chrome-based browsers at the moment. This will hopefully change this year.

Interesting. Thanks for posting! I like your website aesthetic.

It looks to be using webviews in Electron and maybe synced using a custom chrome extension / content script, which would make it more of a HTML DOM mirroring approach, rather than streaming the pixels.

Electron is just a wrapper around the web app. You can use Switchboard from your own web browser without it.

We have our own proprietary cloud browser platform that we created from the ground up. The browsers are full-fledged browsers that can do anything a normal browser can do (some exceptions apply but generally not an issue for web apps that businesses tend to use) including watching youtube or netflix.

Impressive!! It's good to know, because I've had many customers think there are not many vendors in this case. I will be sure to refer some business your way totally gratis if you are okay with that?

Anyway, happy to connect with your team if you like: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cris-dosyago/

Of course! Really appreciated. Did you work on the browser platform yourself?

Thanks for the question!! :) At first, yes. For the first 3 years but then in 2021 I started to get customers and figure out how to make money, which is a mix of customization work, custom deployments and licensing right now.

The post today is because I want to test out a SaaS option in future!

Most of our team works with customers on their deployments and customizations, like "forward deployed engineers". Because it's mostly cybersecurity, we don't publish any identifying info on staffing, and everyone just uses my GitHub identity when pushing to the main repo: none of the actual public contributors on GitHub are DOSYAGO employees.

It's a lot of work, that's why my account has 4000+ contributions in 12 months haha

You are the cloud browser god.

Hahaha! Come say hello on PH if you want, just launched our Puter.com app there: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/cloudtabs-1

Ok a new server in US region is up.

Unfortunately the disk filled up on the Europe server and Canadian server. I had to nuke all the Ephemeral sessions. Capability should be back now. OS told me disk was 100.0% used when I logged in.

It was all tempfs mounted for each user. I never realized its importance. Will need bigger disks.

I'll add some timed updates to keep things organized below this point:

17:57:00 Z

Will add 2 new 32 core servers in Europe, and Asia, as both those regions are seeing lots of demand. Asia is at 100% right now.

18:03:00 Z

Just started creation of the Japan server. Once I get the install script started, I'll move to create the Europe one.

18:18:00 Z

Okay, Japan server should be online. Sorry about everybody in SEA that I just nuked your sessions, that must have sucked. The server was hard to manage at 100% utilization. Moving to create a new Europe server now.

18:26:00 Z

Okay Europe server is provisioned and setup is starting now. It should be live in about 10 minutes.

18:32:00 Z

London server is live. Stats update: since posting to HN 2 hours ago we had about 2000 sessions across (initially) 4 16core 32GB 128disk servers. So far have had to add 3 more 32/64/1TB servers, with disk being the unexpected cost to this type of load. BTW if anyone is reading this how was your experience? Was it slow/fast? Responsive? What region were you in?

18:42:00 Z

I'm monitoring the 7 servers now.

18:48:00 Z

Right now server selection is based on RTT/ping from client. I'm thinking it might be good to have ping endpoint include the current load. But I don't want to bork it.

19:31:00 Z

Okay, load average has been added to the ping check for fastest server. We now pick between the fastest two pings based on which has the lowest load. Should work well.

Use Case: As a dog I want to chase my tail so that I can see what happens.

Issue: CloudTabs Web Browser locks up and does not respond to further input.

Steps to reproduce:

1. On Android smartphone using Chrome browser, visit CloudTabs Web Browser.

2. Within CloudTabs Browser search for Hacker News on DuckDuckGo.

3. Click on link to Hacker News.

4. Find post about CloudTabs Web Browser and click on it.

5. CloudTabs Web Browser starts loading but does not finish and locks up.

Hahaha Thanks! Normally that works. Probably just because there's right now hundreds of sessions simultaneously that it is timing out. Back on the front page, eh?

For reference I've included a photo of such a scenario created by one of our "expert dogs": https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/816

Perhaps fellow tail chasers out there can enjoy vicariously...at least until the load dies down!!

Love the "Loopback" photo! Very cool product, nice work!

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