Show HN: Run puppeteer scripts from the Browser, open DevTools on remote pages

• ViewFinderJS

  13 1,392 8.0 JavaScript

  Discontinued :camera: ViewFinder - Remote isolated browser API for security, automation visibility and interactivity. RBI. CBII. Remote browser isolation, embeddable BrowserView, secure chrome-as-a-service. Managed, variable bandwidth and co-browsing options available in Pro versions. Like S2, WebGap, Bromium, Authentic8, Menlo Security and Broadcom, but free and open-source. Integrated secure document viewing with CDR from https://github.com/dosyago/p2%2e [Moved to: https://github.com/i5ik/ViewFinder]

2 known issues:

- DevTools doesn't display the viewport. I'm not sure if this is due to a change in the latest Chrome to which I just updated (~90) or because I broke my serving of it by updating it. A workaround will be serving a static snapshot of the devtools front-end rather than just (simply, as I'm doing right now) pulling it out of Chrome's RDP endpoint each time. This may take some time to do.

- DevTools doesn't seem to work on iOS (as I've tested it, Safari or Chrome).

- There are many more issues, and a lot, but not all, of them are edge cases but they'll be fixed eventually.

More bug reports, UI/UX tips and advice, and other feedback are very welcome! Unfortunately the whole app is not open source but some parts are open source, namely, the virtualized browser[0], and the devtools-front-end[1].

[0]: https://github.com/i5ik/ViewFinderJS

[1]: https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/devtools-frontend

• devtools-frontend

  7 2,983 10.0 TypeScript

  The Chrome DevTools UI

  

2 known issues:

- DevTools doesn't display the viewport. I'm not sure if this is due to a change in the latest Chrome to which I just updated (~90) or because I broke my serving of it by updating it. A workaround will be serving a static snapshot of the devtools front-end rather than just (simply, as I'm doing right now) pulling it out of Chrome's RDP endpoint each time. This may take some time to do.

- DevTools doesn't seem to work on iOS (as I've tested it, Safari or Chrome).

- There are many more issues, and a lot, but not all, of them are edge cases but they'll be fixed eventually.

More bug reports, UI/UX tips and advice, and other feedback are very welcome! Unfortunately the whole app is not open source but some parts are open source, namely, the virtualized browser[0], and the devtools-front-end[1].

[0]: https://github.com/i5ik/ViewFinderJS

[1]: https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/devtools-frontend

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• jQuery-File-Upload

  6 31,075 5.1 PHP

  Discontinued File Upload widget with multiple file selection, drag&drop support, progress bar, validation and preview images, audio and video for jQuery. Supports cross-domain, chunked and resumable file uploads. Works with any server-side platform (Google App Engine, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, Java, etc.) that supports standard HTML form file uploads.

And it's a high coincidence that we both released some sort of similar thing at the same time. I love the look of his puppeteer debugger console, his is much more polished that mine :)

Some things I noticed about https://chrome.browserless.io

- after using it for a bit the actual tab in my browser crashed with error "STATUS_BREAKPOINT"

- Does not work on Mobile, it loaded, and ran the script, but I couldn't type into the editor on my Android phone

- I tried to bork it with while(true) page.browser().newPage() it seemed OK

- I tried to bork it with a speedtest, it seemed OK

- No back buttons, so I needed to go to console to history.back()

- No paste into page, no right-click context menu

- Did not raise a pseudo-modal for remote page modal dialogs, I assume it silently closes them. I.e. https://infosimples.github.io/detect-headless/

- Fails (or passes, depending on your perspective) the "Are you Headless?" test at https://arh.antoinevastel.com/bots/areyouheadless

- Did not raise a pseudo-modal for remote page file chooser dialogs, I assume it silently closes them. I.e. https://blueimp.github.io/jQuery-File-Upload/

- Appears to close the browser every time you press the |> play button. I think that makes debugging fluid.

- Does not raise a pseudo-modal for remote page basic auth modal dialogs, it seems to silently close them. I.e https://jigsaw.w3.org/HTTP/Basic/ (at https://jigsaw.w3.org/HTTP/)

All in all I love how the DevTools window is integrated with the page, even tho it does eat up screen real-estate, it's ok. I also love how product-focused Joel is and how the provided scripts are really laser focused on the use cases of his customers. That's what I think is Joel's biggest strength, how much of a good businessman he is, how focussed on his customers he is, and how he delivers that value for them. That's also what I think is my biggest weakness. Compared to how he's building products and features, I'm like wandering around in the dark shining my flashlight on whatever looks interesting to me. I'm not so honed and focused and that's to my detriment, I think. Design is another weakness I have. But we shall see how things go!

Maybe I'll catch up to him. Maybe I'll overtake him! But I'm not sure that side of the business, "puppeteer automation at scale" is necessarily what I want to go into. We'll see what happens tho! :)

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