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Show HN: GoGoBrowse – A Peer to Peer Web Browser (gogobrowse.com)

25 points by ddj231 ↗ HN
Hi HN!

GoGoBrowse is a side project I've been working on that allows 2 users to browse the web together while voice chatting.

It's a proof of concept for a new model of browsing the web I've been thinking about. My thought is that before a leap to a 3D Metaverse, we need a 2D Metaverse, which is simply social web browsing. I wrote more about it here: https://gogobrowse.com/before-the-metaverse-we-need-a-new-we...

Though the goal of an entirely social web browser is still quite a ways off, I think of this as a small first step in that direction.

I'd love any feedback on the app itself, and the general concept of social web browsing.

11 comments

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ddj231
I've been working GoGoBrowse in the evenings on and off for the last couple of weeks. The audio chat is built with WebRTC, and a signaling server.

Users send each other urls in a peer to peer way, just like audio data (so no urls are sent to the server). The browser then navigates to the url received.

The browser itself is a Chromium Browser (the Electron BrowserView).

The website is built with Notion + Super.so.

Let me know if you have any questions :)

tommoor
Are there technical reason this couldn't be achieve as a browser extension? Or is more for just the learning experience.
ddj231
With the current direction, I believe it would work as a browser extension.

At first I tried to send the whole dom from one user to another, so users would see the exact same thing (no personalization like some sites do) -- and that didn't work out. It was easy to stream the html from one user to another via webrtc but the styles and javascript seemed non trivial.

So I landed at this more simple version. I haven't experimented much with browser extensions but for that approach, I would just create the peer connection between users in the extension. And simulate a click whenever a leader changes urls. (that may actually be better than this current Chromium browser version)

KomoD
Yeah I'm not downloading a random ZIP from some website that is just a Notion document

And when the "Disclaimer" is copy-paste with "[business name]" in it

"The information contained in this website is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by [business name]"

ddj231
Point taken. This is a side project to get conversations going on social browsing in general (not my full time gig) -- I think I may just open source the repo so people can build themselves
pipeline_peak
Why not just share a screen on discord etc? I feel this would just be toe stepping
ddj231
The difference would be that you and a friend are on the same web page, like a news article (the same location), but you still retain control of your page. Scrolling, etc.

Also you can sync YouTube videos, so you get better quality than you would via screen share.

pipeline_peak
I mean with screen sharing, I’d still retain control.

I never saw YouTube quality as an issue, but there are watch together extensions for discord.

I think your better off just making an extension.

graderjs
Agree. There's things you can do by virtualizing or instrumenting the browser that you can't with just screen sharing. It's a more specialized technology that powers more specific use cases.

If folks like this, they may also be interested in the neko project: https://github.com/m1k1o/neko

Or even a similar work of my own company: BrowserBox Pro -- where you can share a link to a single browser with multiple people. Co-browsing or co-operative / collaborative browsing is the "term of art" I believe.

https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro