BrowserBox VS cicada

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

Click through for a version on a server close to you that you can play with now.

Source code here: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

This demo is probably not really ready for a widespread audience, but luck it I’m just posting it anyway

> Edit: parent commenter seems to be promoting their product. Looks like a random remote browser, perhaps avoid entering important credentials there.

True. Maybe I should have put a full disclosure? I thought it was obvious, but I get if it wasn't. I'm sorry for not being more clear!

It's a good point to advise people to avoid entering important credentials in something that probably looks untrusted. I'd also advise that at this stage as we have no SLAs for now, and are just testing this SaaS-to-be demo of this source-available product:

https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

Thank you for pointing out the reasonable and important security concerns. Although I should have probably done that myself, I was just so eager to help!

Aside: I am surprised tho that you were unable to even login on your VPN. I would think that the IP blocks we run the browser form and those of a VPN would be in the same category of 'cloud IPs', so why should it work on CloudTabs but fail for you directly on a VPN? Who knows?

These are difficult problems and perhaps the modern web has developed at a pace that older tech like RDP has not kept pace with. But Guacamole bucks that trend. The video shows how far it has come.

Guacamole is good, and I love that it's clientles and works in the browsers, but VNC lacks sound so you need to do that separately. Also the input lag when remote frames increase in frequency is challenging.

If you're looking for something lighter weight and possibly smoother and faster (albeit non-free software with a non-commercial option), check out BrowserBox: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

Solving input lag, and maintaining responsiveness across a range of bandwidth situations has been one of our priorities and I think we've mostly achieved.

We've accomplished this through a combination of sensible heuristics for congestion control, and using WebRTC with a fallback to WebSockets when faster. We also have audio out of the box, no set up required!

However there's always room to improve, which is why it makes it so exciting to work on. Depending on how close you are to a server you may encounter lag issues, too. Check out a free live demo of it working here (sorry, signup is not supported yet!):

https://browse.cloudtabs.net/signupless_session

Some other problems we solve that are not always so easy to configure with Guacamole (and are harder to do with an RDP layer in general), but much easier for us as we virtualize the browser itself are first class mobile support.

Obviously that's an issue with remoting desktops from small form devices in general, but if a browser is all you need remotely then we got your back! :)

Same time, BrowserBox will not be for everyone. It all depends on what you need. Get on touch if you are interested!

Run your browser on a remote machine? Using say BrowserBox: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

Full disclaimer: my company develops it.

to "repoint", or reorient an active RDP session to instead targe the "console", a sort of persistent virtual terminal session that the computer always has. From the days of when people actually sat in front of the machines they were using. Physically, like.

I thought that if I could send my RDP session to console then it would live. It would be alive!

And it was. But the audio still died.

All the while, I was context switching out of RDP back to my macOS desktop, to check my BrowserBox connection open in a regular browser tab. Every time, no matter what weird configurations, registry settings, or supposed ways to change various settings related to RDP, nothing worked. Every time audio still died.

This was quite possible the biggest, craziest bug I ever worked on. (Interestingly enough the second biggest, craziest bug I ever worked on was also audio related).

But maybe it wasn't a bug. Maybe it just wasn't to be. Perhaps the gods willed it to be not so. None shall ever, from now until the ashes fall upon the ghost of the world, and time stands finally still, stream audio from Windows Server without a real RDP connection.

It was during this period I also discovered the idea of a Windows Session Host server with Client Access Licenses. Turns out, you need to purchase a RDP license from Windows if you want more than 2 RDP sessions (approximately) to the same OS instance/VM.

Turns out, too, that this notion was not related at all to getting audio to work.

It really seemed like I'd never get there. I was starting to think: Cut my losses, abandon it. It was a nice dream, shame it didn't work out, but that's what happens sometimes.

One day, I woke up with a hunch, that if I could someone use VNC at the same time as RDP, perhaps I could trick the repointed console session into staying alive. I didn't know how or why this should happen, but it just seemed like: it should, somehow. As if through all my intense working with Windows, it was somehow whispering to me, telling me how it wanted to be treated. As if Windows itself wanted this to occur, and somehow through all the interacting with it, I'd absorbed that message. And figured it out. I knew I was onto something with this. Momentum, and optimism, returned. I felt re-energized. I began to feel like this was possible. But still, I had no idea how to do it.

Turns out, I eventually figured it out. And made it repeatable. And further that it worked on: Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2019. It also, IIRC, worked on Windows 10 and Windows 11.

I formalized it all into a ridiculous PowerShell script where nothing now seemed impossible (so I went so far as to even use crazy C#-in-PowerShell hacks to close windows automatically as part of the install process, just to ensure that all that epic work, 10 hour days, maybe for over two weeks or more, were not wasted. And finally I ended up with a script that actually managed to both install BrowserBox, and set up the required VNC/RDP dance needed to keep the Windows audio drivers active, even when I do not have an RDP connection.

It was kind of complex, and like synchronized swimming, depended crucially on the order of the orchestrated VNC and RDP connections, and what was done in each session, but roughly, the process the enable audio on Windows versions, went like this:

- Create an initial RDP connection to the Windows based server for setup.

- Set up the application by performing a normal install of BrowserBox

- Open up registry key settings enabling: multiple (the maximum allowed for free, which is 2) sessions; and connecting to localhost

- Also set up a login script that will perform "The Magic Task" described below.

- Install VNC, and configure it with a password. From within that RDP session, create a VNC connection from that Windows server to itself, and ensure that VNC window is open and not minimized.

- From within that loopback VNC session just created, execute the logon script (which will happen automatically) to perform the Magic Task. The Magic Task is: use tscon to repoint the current main active RDP connection (from my local computer to this remote Windows machine) to instead point at console, disconnecting me, and creating a ourobouros-double-loopback-VNC-RDP-ying-yang super session that is self-stabilizing and crucially (Crucially! because at that point it had been 3 weeks of effort!), keep the audio streaming

The music might die one day. But not today.

I managed to factor out this code into a relatively reusable-esque script that I called Thunderbird (because I was so in awe of myself at that point haha!)

You can see the code here:

https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/blob/boss/windows-s...

Postscript

Turns out tho, despite all that effort, Windows was never a very popular target for BrowserBox. Sure, good to prove that it works there and provide a first blush at support, but in the end, not that many people use Windows to run BrowserBox. As proud as I am of that achievement, I can't even guarantee the method described still works today. The script had so many moving parts, I imagine it would be pretty fragile. Also, I have a suspicion that, as of this post today, Microsoft may hear this and want to lock down this seeming workaround because, even tho I don't think there's a way to use it to get more RDP connections that licensed, it sort of seems like something that shouldn't be possible, so I'm kind of worried they will just stamp it out.

This sucks. Supply chain is such an issue.

Even tho we don't currently target any npm releases, I make use of socket.dev to monitor my project by creating an npm release for it. But my project BrowserBox (lightweight virtualized web browser) only uses ~800 dependencies including all descendents, with only 19 top-level deps (cool your heels non-JavaScript folks, this is comparatively lightweight for a full stack boing).

I'm considering just snapshotting all 800 deps into a @browserbox namespace at npm. And then tracking any vulnerabilities discovered and patching the fixes.

It sounds crazy, but that's where we are. At least that way I "own" all the dependencies and can guarantee (up to company security at least) that we don't have supply chain vulns on the Node/JS side.

https://socket.dev

https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

Not sure if related, but recently read about https://github.com/Cicada-Software/cicada which looks like to abstract GithubCI and GitlabCI.

LICENSE AGPL

https://github.com/Cicada-Software/cicada/blob/main/LICENSE

I.. wouldn't use to build commercial software.

I'm guessing it's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35364146 although it didn't seem to get much traction other than the one comment that matches what I found while trying to read up on it:

https://github.com/Cicada-Software/cicada/blob/main/docs/ci-...

> create a file _anywhere in your repository_ ending in .ci

uh-huh

> Note that you cannot use the pipe operator (|) with the shell command, only one command can be executed at a time

uh-huh

> To make sure that your workflow works, try pushing to your repository

so, no local runner for this, either. fantastic.

So instead of using Starlark, which a non-trivial number of folks already know, there's already editor support for, and is obviously designed to be embedded, they decided that what the world needs is another DSL. Got it.

Hi HN! My name is Logan Hunt, and I am the founder and CEO of Cicada. Cicada is a self-hostable CICD platform that integrates with GitHub and Gitlab, allowing you to write workflows without caring about the underlying implementation details of the platform you are using. Source code (AGPL-v3 licensed) is available here: https://github.com/Cicada-Software/cicada and the live site is available here: https://cicada.sh

With Cicada you build automation workflows using our custom DSL (domain specific langauge), built specifically for writing automation workflows. The Cicada DSL is a fully functional programming language, meaning you can use variables, if statements (coming soon!), and execute shell commands without having to write a single line of YAML. And, best of all, these workflows can work with GitHub and Gitlab without any modifications.

One of the best parts of GitHub Actions (IMO) is the ability to easily trigger workflows from many types of events such as git pushes, opening/closing pull requests, or creating a new release. With Cicada you will be able to fire off workflows for all of these events, no matter what platform you choose. Say good by to vendor lock-in!

Having used GitHub Actions, Gitlab CI, and Azure DevOps at my previous job, I found that these tools where good at describing basic automation tasks, but failed whenever you wanted to do something complex. In addition, these platforms all use YAML for configuring their workflow files, which means you need to write a shell script for anything more complex than basic linting or testing. Another inherent problem with these solutions is that they all use different YAML formats, making them incompatible with one another, further locking you in to their platform. Cicada solves that by making a single, unified format that works no matter what platform you use, and converts all the platform-specific events types into one platform-agnostic type. This means that a git push event coming from GitHub will look identical to a git push event coming from Gitlab.

Cicada is in the early stages right now. A working MVP is up and running, but it is far from complete. I've been holding off open-sourcing Cicada until later, but given the recent GitHub outages this week, I felt this would be the perfect time to do an initial "launch".

Currently Cicada is running on a small Linode server, and the workflows are ran using Docker. I've removed the white-list so anybody can run workflows for the time being, though I expect it will get swamped rather quickly, in which case I will re-add the white-list. Also, getting GitHub permissions right is hard, so for the time being, you must push to GitHub repositories that are on your personal account (and are an owner of).

Let me know what you think!