spawner VS chromium

For the “jhub but for any container that speaks HTTP” use case, you might find our Spawner project interesting: https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner

We don’t have a good story for volumes yet, but I’m open to ideas.

Is the appeal of isolates in this case the cold start time or the isolation? We're working on some open source infrastructure for running sandboxed (gVisor) containers on the fly from web services[1], and one of the use cases people have is serving Jupyter notebooks which seems like it might resemble your use case?

[1] https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner/

yes! a fellow HN user e-mailed me about his project "Spawner"

https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner

check out the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGsxxcQRKa4

Drifting in Space | Full-time | NYC | https://driftingin.space

We make Jamsocket (https://jamsocket.com/), which allows application developers to spin up and connect to server-side compute. This allows browser-based applications to do computationally-intensive things that are otherwise impossible in the browser.

We went through YC and just raised a seed round and are looking to build up our team. We are based in NYC but are open to remote for experience candidates.

Our tech stack includes Rust, NATS, Docker, Postgres, TypeScript. We have lots of fun technical problems that get into the nitty-gritty of networking and operating systems. We are excited to build a diverse team and encourage non-traditional candidates to apply.

Email [email protected] or see more details here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/drifting-in-space/jobs...

Hi HN, we’re Paul and Taylor, and we’re launching Drifting in Space (https://driftingin.space). We build server software for performance-intensive browser-based applications. We make it easy to give every user of your app a dedicated server-side process, which starts when they open your application and stops when they close the tab.

Many high-end web apps give every user a dedicated connection to a server-side process. That is how they get the low latency that you need for ambitious products like full-fledged video editing tools and IDEs. This is hard for smaller teams to recreate, though, because it takes a significant ongoing engineering investment. That’s where we come in—we make this architecture available to everyone, so you can focus on your app instead of its infrastructure. You can think of it like Heroku, except that each of your users gets their own server instance.

I realized that something like this was needed while working on data-intensive tools at a hedge fund. I noticed that almost all new application software, whether it was built in-house or third-party SaaS, was delivered as a browser application rather than native. Although browsers are more powerful than ever, I knew from experience that industrial-scale data-heavy apps posed problems, because neither the browser or a traditional stateless server architecture could provide the compute resources needed for low-latency interaction with large datasets. I began talking about this with my friend Taylor, who had encountered similar limitations while working on data analysis and visualization tools at Datadog and Uber. We decided to team up and build a company around solving it.

We have two products, an open source package and a managed platform. Spawner, the open source part, provides an API for web apps to spawn a session-lived process. It manages the process’s lifecycle, exposing it over HTTPS, tracking inbound connections, and shutting it down when it becomes idle (i.e. when the user closes their tab). It’s open source (MIT) and available at https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner.

Jamsocket is our managed platform, which uses Spawner internally. It provides the same API, but frees you from having to deal with any cluster or network configuration to ship code. From an app developer’s point of view, using it is similar to using platforms like Netlify or Render. You stay in the web stack and never have to touch Kubernetes.

Here's an example. Imagine you make an application for investigating fraud in a large transaction database. Users want to interactively filter, aggregate, and visualize gigabytes of transactions as a graph. Instead of sending all of the data down to the browser and doing the work there, you would put your code in a container and upload it to our platform. Then, whenever a fraud analyst opens your application, you hit an API we provide to spin up a dedicated backend for that analyst. Your browser code then opens a WebSocket connection directly to that backend, which it uses to stream data as the analyst applies filters or zooms/pans the visualization.

We're different from most managed platforms because we give each user a dedicated process. That said, there are a few other services that do run long-lived processes for each user. Architecturally, we're most similar to Agones. Agones is targeted at games where the client can speak UDP to an arbitrary IP; we target applications that want to connect directly from browsers to a hostname over HTTPS. In the Erlang world, the OTP stack provides similar functionality, but you have to embrace Erlang/Elixir to get the benefits of it; we are entirely language-agnostic. Cloudflare Durable Objects support a form of long-lived processes, but are focused on use cases around program state synchronization rather than arbitrary high-compute/memory use cases.

We have a usage-based billing model, similar to Heroku. We charge you for the compute you use and take a cut. Usage billing scales to zero, so it’s approachable for weekend experiments. We have not solidified a price plan yet, but we’re aiming to provide an instance capable of running VS Code (as an example) for about 10 cents an hour, fractionally metered. High-memory and high-CPU backends will cost more, and heavy users will get volume discounts. Our target customers are desktop-like SaaS apps and internal data tools.

As mentioned, our core API is open source and available at https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner. The managed platform is in beta and we’re currently onboarding users from a waitlist, to make sure that we have the server capacity to scale. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to sign up for it here: https://driftingin.space.

Have you built a similar infrastructure for your application? We’re always interested in hearing the approaches people have already taken to this problem and learning what their pain points are.

One of the unexpected use of shadow DOMs for me was a document generated for image resource URLs [1], because the HTML standard apparently specifies the exact DOM structure of the generated document except for the `` element [2].

[1] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/f02ca73/third_part...

[2] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/document-lifecycle.ht...

Recently my favorite open source mouse gestures extension SmartUp Gestures was taken over by some shady entity (with github no longer being updated of course).

I opened Chrome ticket that they should ask to re-enable extension when ownership changes. They just closed the ticket replying with this link:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/extens...

:(

Hmm. It looks like files with the .lnk or .pif file extension can only be downloaded on a user gesture: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/39841e54180...

So it can't be done silently. Although, I do wish the type was marked "DANGEROUS" a la dll files.

On Linux, Chromium uses setuid or user namespaces to restrict the access of sandboxed components and seccomp-bpf to reduce the kernel attack surface.

Check out the Chromium docs on this topic: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/l...

You can also disable JIT in Firefox by setting javascript.options.baselinejit to false in about:config, although you won't get CET.

[1] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/12c232c43ce7324d30...

Chromium targets iOS already: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i...

For the sake of completeness, I've traced the evolution of the notice over time:

From 2008-07-26: "Going incognito doesn't affect the behavior of other people, servers, or software. Be wary of: / • Websites that collect or share information about you / • Internet service providers or employers that track the pages you visit / • Malicious software that tracks your keystrokes in exchange for free smileys / • Surveillance by secret agents / • People standing behind you" (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/09911bf300f...)

From 2013-12-07: "Going incognito doesn't affect the behavior of other people, servers, software, or people standing behind you." (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/c5e36c57178...)

From 2013-12-13: "However, you aren't invisible. Going incognito doesn't hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider, or the websites you visit." (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/70821506825...)

From 2014-02-27: "However, you aren't invisible. Going incognito doesn't hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider, governments and other sophisticated attackers, or the websites you visit." (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/ab54bd65701...)

From 2014-04-29: "Going incognito doesn't hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider, or the websites you visit." (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/eb09a62ef40...)

From 2016-01-15: "However, you aren't invisible. Going incognito doesn’t hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider, or the websites you visit." (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/b7dac1a6a79...)

From 2017-02-27: "Your activity might still be visible to: / • Websites you visit / • Your employer / • Your internet service provider" (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/cfe102adddc...)

From 2017-03-29: "Your activity might still be visible to: / • Websites you visit / • Your employer or school / • Your internet service provider" (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/7ca3ccf74e8...)

(Note that some of these were behind a feature flag for a few months.) Also, it looks like they've been intending to modify the new-tab page text for Incognito windows for some time, as part of the "Revamped Incognito NTP" project. You can view the modified text with 'chromium --enable-features=IncognitoNtpRevamp':

From 2021-08-13: "What Incognito doesn't do / Incognito does not make you invisible online: / • Sites know when you visit them / • Employers or schools can track browsing activity / • Internet service providers may monitor web traffic" (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/e6ae57ba385...)

From 2022-01-25: "What Incognito doesn't do / Incognito does not make you invisible online: / • Sites and the services they use can see visits / • Employers or schools can track browsing activity / • Internet service providers can monitor web traffic" (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/8b349f6c984...)

Blink can now be compiled for iOS, but without JIT or WASM:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i...

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=141170...

I think its weird that Vercel has this limit. There is no practical reason I can think of for having such a limit on URL characters that is so small. Chrome suggests a 2MB limit[0] for example. The platform itself doesn't have one, and Firefox I believe if memory serves (I can't find the source for this claim atm) is 1 MB effectively, and I don't think Safari is any lower than that either (and may well be more inline with Chrome on this, at 2 MB)

[0]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...