BrowserView
Build your own browser, one that you fully control
https://medium.com/@cris_39045/why-i-built-my-own-browser-and-you-can-too-9dda4b4de869
One thing you can do out of the box is run the browser in the cloud (docker container is included), which helps you prevent your device being tracked and hacked, because all the web browsing happens in the cloud, you just connect to the front-end (which only sends you pixels from the page). Some people call this a secure, isolated remote browser.
Anyway, there’s so much more you can do with this project. If you know some programming you can fully customize this browser app in so many ways (more ways than you can customize Chrome). You can literally build your own browser, instead of having a browser controlled by a massive company. This is a browser nobody controls but you.
I posted to HN (twice, second time got banned), got on the front page twice, and collected about 350 stars through both those, plus answered a lot of questions.
I thought about what I really wanted to do with this and iterated on my marketing copy to convey the right message. Over the next 2 - 3 weeks more people kept discovering it on GitHub organically and starring it.
On someone's suggestion, I open sourced a year of work. I originally intended to keep it closed source, but I decided that this product was too hot, and that anyone who wanted to get the code could easily hack me or GitLab to get it.
In that case the best thing to do for me would be to release it to all, to deny any bad actors the advantage they would have of theft.
In order to self fund this my idea is to build products or value added services on top of this open platform. So BrowserView let's you build your own browser, maybe a service where people can run their own secure remote isolated browser will be something they will pay for?
That's one bet. There are other things I can make on top of this open source project to try to turn into businesses.
I used to develop Chrome extensions to add things I wanted to the browser experience. But over time I realized they couldn’t do everything. Wanna shut a modal dialog with JS? Can’t do it. Recently, their power has been getting less and less. The APIs used to block ads are being restricted. I wanted more power.
So I shifted to using DevTools protocol. That API allows you to do anything to the Browser. You can completely customize it.
So what I did is I built an open source project that lets you do that.
It’s not just an API, the project has a front-end (that looks like a browser) and you can serve this front-end as an Electron app, or over the web as a web app.
Comment