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.
- 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.
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.
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...
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!
We don't know each other and I wasn't aware you were interested. I don't think you've reached out to me before.
It sounds like you have a very negative impression of me and my work, and I'm sure it seems like a lot of people have that.
I'm sorry for getting the Gumroad capitalization wrong: I've changed that Gumroad to the correct one.
I think it's understandable that people can get confused so let's bring some clarity to that. I'll deal with the linked comments first? But I'll add more in edits
- The difficulty in ELI5: It is hard, because it's like "What can you build with a browser you can embed". Sort of like anything. From your days in YC, you may be connected to another recent YC company also offering embeddable multiplayer browsers. The possibilities are endless. See my other comments in this thread for ideas.
- The belief that BrowserBox is a rip off of ViewFinderJS ( I assume that's what "to MuleSoft" something means). Actually, ViewFinderJS was a name I gave the project at one point in the past, because it's like a viewfinder, and I like photography. But I thought the name wasn't as clear as something else. So I basically just changed the name whenever I came up with a better one. Kind of like "open creative process" or "showing my work". Just change to the better name whenever I had one. Some other names in the past were: Zanj, BrowserGap. You can think of CloudTabs as an application of the BrowserBox technology! I understand the succession of names can be confusing but I Just wanted to arrive at the best one.
- That is quite a lot of research. Someone really spent some time looking into all the licenses of the past. I was surprised why they didn't just email me: suddenly this research appears on my thread from someone I've never heard from before. Again, it's like the names: I just changed it when I thought I could have a better license. I felt ripped off by open source licenses, and people's sense of entitlement. I felt I'd been duped into using OSS licenses, but people didn't care about me or my work, they just wanted something for themselves. I didn't understand licenses at first. And then I started to get a picture, still within the "dogma" of OSS, and I thought AGPL. But in the end I just realized OSS is not a good fit for something which is a comprehensive product like BrowserBox is (better fit for a component). And at different points I'd read something and think, "Oh, that's the good license" and kind of get excited about it and put it in there, and then change it later. More just like an artistic process. Repainting / reworking. Maybe you can say it's not ideal from a license point of view, but...like, I don't really care. We put in a lot of work on this. And I want to capture the rewards of that. OSS licenses were getting in the way here, so they had to go. But I went through a process of thinking maybe there was a better option in OSS, but turns out there wasn't. I imagine some people are pissed off that they can't get that tech for free. I thought people would pay even if it was OSS, but people are not like that. I'm not worried about the earlier work: it's just like a contribution to the community. We put in so much work since then, people can't take that. At the end of the day, if people want to license our technology, they can just deal with us transparently, in the open, and pay. If it's so valuable, of course they will. And if you're an individual or non-profit, there's the non-commercial option.
edit: Okay, nvm, thank you for giving me permission to form opinions -- I regret attempting to dive down into "why people come to the idea [of shadiness]". Your position is understandable, best of luck.
Peace :)
---
original post: That's how posting on a forum works --- most people read, very few engage.
I've been reluctant to engage because I found some answers like "you can go look at the pricing in the HTML of the SPA" particularly uninviting.
Especially after I invested some time... trying to comprehend how much I should care about what you're building.
Thank you for all the other points -- and let me put aside any "something feels off" references/notes/comments.
(In my (very limited) life experience, when you ask for feedback... actually addressing it goes very well (in life, and also on HN). Additionally, introducing yourself as an actual person with a backstory seems to work.
Anyway, I looked more into this and, I think it's worth saying more on this. For those who want to just skip to the good stuff, you can purchase licenses at:
We support a range of use cases include full white-labeling, concurrent user seats, named user seats, perpetual licensing, or yearly licensing for our remote isolated browsing technology. We'll be rolling out a developer API later in 2024, and we have other exciting announcements coming up. Right now we primarily offer licensing, as well as offering a wide variety of tailored support, maintenance and customization packages!!! :)
Just wanted to also note some good comments on this original post that were somehow dead flagged:
Thanks, CloudTabs looks useful for me. And the pricing is affordable. I tried it for a while and it's quite smooth.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39953372 - Thank you! It really is affordable haha :)
I googled my location by using "where am i", it showed Area 51 Nevada, hahahttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39932709 -- haha, yep this is true! It's a little inside joke with us. A way to hide your geo while providing a comical answer. A nod to our interest in UFOs and the frontiers of tech, consciousness and science! :)
--
Also I wanted to say something else about Ian, the other 'bad' commenter that was dead flagged. So...here's linked some blog posts from him to counter all the crazy links he did to our years old commits and comments, which nevertheless simply show our work and honest evolving through process over time!!!! Unlike him, his dishonest. Hahah :) ):
Ian is unfortunately previously associated with YC and I consider it not a good look for someone like that to jump onto a YC property / Show HN and make really negative comments. Especially considering that YC people are often involved in reviewing YC applications and it seems he could have been involved in reviewing some of our previous applications. Which makes his lies about "shady" behavior all the more egregious! A perversion of truth and possibly a violation of personal information. I think that's possibly where he begun his fixation. But clearly the only person displaying shady behavior here, is Ian! What could he possibly be talking about? -- besides his own projections?
Because I've changed my username on HN? So? My previous account, which I linked to when I first created this current one is totally fine. But I'm not going to be coerced into linking to just because someone makes some shady false allegations, but it's easy to find. But the reason I left that? Because I'd accrued more than 10,000+ karma in under 3 years. And I just thought, "This is too easy. I want to start fresh". So I did. Ian sees a problem with that, he's just projecting some negative from his own mind. I mean, I get if he would be doing something "shady" in that situation himself - I'm certainly not. So all I can say to him is: Ian, you find there what you bring to it. I get you feel that way about me and my work and my company, and my products, but that's not how it is. Sorry to say, man. You're deluded.
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:
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?
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
59 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] thread- 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:
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
Which version are you?
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.
(Regardless, it's cool, and does in fact seem to work pretty well)
- My Plan (pricing info and subscribe / manage)
- About (including roadmap / impressum)
- Settings (for now just the home page!)
etc
:)
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
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
We don't know each other and I wasn't aware you were interested. I don't think you've reached out to me before.
It sounds like you have a very negative impression of me and my work, and I'm sure it seems like a lot of people have that.
I'm sorry for getting the Gumroad capitalization wrong: I've changed that Gumroad to the correct one.
I think it's understandable that people can get confused so let's bring some clarity to that. I'll deal with the linked comments first? But I'll add more in edits
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490389
- The difficulty in ELI5: It is hard, because it's like "What can you build with a browser you can embed". Sort of like anything. From your days in YC, you may be connected to another recent YC company also offering embeddable multiplayer browsers. The possibilities are endless. See my other comments in this thread for ideas.
- The belief that BrowserBox is a rip off of ViewFinderJS ( I assume that's what "to MuleSoft" something means). Actually, ViewFinderJS was a name I gave the project at one point in the past, because it's like a viewfinder, and I like photography. But I thought the name wasn't as clear as something else. So I basically just changed the name whenever I came up with a better one. Kind of like "open creative process" or "showing my work". Just change to the better name whenever I had one. Some other names in the past were: Zanj, BrowserGap. You can think of CloudTabs as an application of the BrowserBox technology! I understand the succession of names can be confusing but I Just wanted to arrive at the best one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495911
- That is quite a lot of research. Someone really spent some time looking into all the licenses of the past. I was surprised why they didn't just email me: suddenly this research appears on my thread from someone I've never heard from before. Again, it's like the names: I just changed it when I thought I could have a better license. I felt ripped off by open source licenses, and people's sense of entitlement. I felt I'd been duped into using OSS licenses, but people didn't care about me or my work, they just wanted something for themselves. I didn't understand licenses at first. And then I started to get a picture, still within the "dogma" of OSS, and I thought AGPL. But in the end I just realized OSS is not a good fit for something which is a comprehensive product like BrowserBox is (better fit for a component). And at different points I'd read something and think, "Oh, that's the good license" and kind of get excited about it and put it in there, and then change it later. More just like an artistic process. Repainting / reworking. Maybe you can say it's not ideal from a license point of view, but...like, I don't really care. We put in a lot of work on this. And I want to capture the rewards of that. OSS licenses were getting in the way here, so they had to go. But I went through a process of thinking maybe there was a better option in OSS, but turns out there wasn't. I imagine some people are pissed off that they can't get that tech for free. I thought people would pay even if it was OSS, but people are not like that. I'm not worried about the earlier work: it's just like a contribution to the community. We put in so much work since then, people can't take that. At the end of the day, if people want to license our technology, they can just deal with us transparently, in the open, and pay. If it's so valuable, of course they will. And if you're an individual or non-profit, there's the non-commercial option.
What else was there?
> I think finding an elegant (and not shady...
Peace :)
---
original post: That's how posting on a forum works --- most people read, very few engage.
I've been reluctant to engage because I found some answers like "you can go look at the pricing in the HTML of the SPA" particularly uninviting.
Especially after I invested some time... trying to comprehend how much I should care about what you're building.
Thank you for all the other points -- and let me put aside any "something feels off" references/notes/comments.
(In my (very limited) life experience, when you ask for feedback... actually addressing it goes very well (in life, and also on HN). Additionally, introducing yourself as an actual person with a backstory seems to work.
In case you have never ran across it, may I recommend https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html ?
My main question (and point of curiosity) remains:
You seem to love building BrowserBox. Why? How did you come across this?
(This is supposed to be an anthropocentric question, thereby best answered by anthropocentric terms -- not technological terms.)
GIVE US THE/A NARRATIVE.
https://dosyago.com
or by contacting
sales@dosyago.com
We support a range of use cases include full white-labeling, concurrent user seats, named user seats, perpetual licensing, or yearly licensing for our remote isolated browsing technology. We'll be rolling out a developer API later in 2024, and we have other exciting announcements coming up. Right now we primarily offer licensing, as well as offering a wide variety of tailored support, maintenance and customization packages!!! :)
Just wanted to also note some good comments on this original post that were somehow dead flagged:
Thanks, CloudTabs looks useful for me. And the pricing is affordable. I tried it for a while and it's quite smooth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39953372 - Thank you! It really is affordable haha :)
I googled my location by using "where am i", it showed Area 51 Nevada, haha https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39932709 -- haha, yep this is true! It's a little inside joke with us. A way to hide your geo while providing a comical answer. A nod to our interest in UFOs and the frontiers of tech, consciousness and science! :)
--
Also I wanted to say something else about Ian, the other 'bad' commenter that was dead flagged. So...here's linked some blog posts from him to counter all the crazy links he did to our years old commits and comments, which nevertheless simply show our work and honest evolving through process over time!!!! Unlike him, his dishonest. Hahah :) ):
https://atha.io/blog/2012-12-04-in-the-news-the-grinnell-mag...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190820190136/https://atha.io/p...
Ian is unfortunately previously associated with YC and I consider it not a good look for someone like that to jump onto a YC property / Show HN and make really negative comments. Especially considering that YC people are often involved in reviewing YC applications and it seems he could have been involved in reviewing some of our previous applications. Which makes his lies about "shady" behavior all the more egregious! A perversion of truth and possibly a violation of personal information. I think that's possibly where he begun his fixation. But clearly the only person displaying shady behavior here, is Ian! What could he possibly be talking about? -- besides his own projections?
Because I've changed my username on HN? So? My previous account, which I linked to when I first created this current one is totally fine. But I'm not going to be coerced into linking to just because someone makes some shady false allegations, but it's easy to find. But the reason I left that? Because I'd accrued more than 10,000+ karma in under 3 years. And I just thought, "This is too easy. I want to start fresh". So I did. Ian sees a problem with that, he's just projecting some negative from his own mind. I mean, I get if he would be doing something "shady" in that situation himself - I'm certainly not. So all I can say to him is: Ian, you find there what you bring to it. I get you feel that way about me and my work and my company, and my products, but that's not how it is. Sorry to say, man. You're deluded.
When he says "T...
https://www.switchboard.app/
Note: We only support Chrome-based browsers at the moment. This will hopefully change this year.
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.
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.
Anyway, happy to connect with your team if you like: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cris-dosyago/
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
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.
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!!
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.
The issue is latency
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?
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.
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.
Although this would probably use more data! Unless you were browsing, say, a very non interactive page that weighed a lot.
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!