Show HN: BrowserBox over SSH – The KRNL Browser
win9-5.com
win9-5.com
The demo is sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think.
This is a text mode access of BrowserBox that has to use its own layout engine. GUI -> TUI requires re-layouting boxes to deconflict, primarily due to the monospace expansion, but also just the coordiante mapping. There's no images, development began a year ago and was completed recently with a mix of Fable and Opus. BrowserBox was developed originally in 2018, and for 7 years all the code was written by humans, mostly by me, before using AI type the code and enhance some aspects of the system in the last 12 months.
A real TUI browser rendering the web as ANSI with its own layout engine. The backend is Google cloud run, running browserbox and the Krnl TUI browser and it is routed through a simple SSH server endpoint. Theoretically it could work without BrowserBox but right now BrowserBox does most of the heavy lifting required to actually create a browser in this way.
Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc).
No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
The point of this over things say lynx/w3m is it fully renders the modern web, all the capabilities, TLS, JavaScript, etc - then showing just the text. So everything just works (ideally), and it's only text. No noise, no images, just text.
I disabled the file upload capability for this demo so you can't upload/explore the container's filesystem. It will go live in the next fleet roll in a few minutes. You can see what the file uplaods normally look like here: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/1647
More on BrowserBox here: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox