Ask HN: Are you interested in a text only browser that runs JavaScript?

15 points by keepamovin 8 days ago

There’s much prior art (good overview here: https://sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/#neighbors), but I’m doing something different that wants to exist.

Curious as to response. Probably a few weeks off release yet but here’s a brief screencap: https://youtu.be/_Bs7BoQBoBA (Or if you prefer an asciinema: https://asciinema.org/a/9w6CMnaI9VxiykI1PgVWm4lsi )

Thoughts?

The context is it’s meant for constrained environments (ultra thin client, engine runs remotely or on same machine if you like; security constraints? Bandwidth constraints? Resource constraints? Content constraints?).

Personally, this is a project close to my heart because my first interactions with computers, and even the Internet was textbased back in the days of dialup and BBS systems. But for another reason in the modern era, I often have the feeling I just wanna get away from all the bullshit all the colors and images begging for my attention. I just want a quiet web that works. But I don’t like an extension knowing everything, and content scripts are fragile. For me, the medium of the terminal is actually a different message and distinct experience that I find valuable. And I think the Internet wants to see itself that way too.

So I’m building this whatever the response here. I also think maybe I can make a trendy thing as OCR is still a major problem and if AI’s can have a text based way to drive web content, maybe they’d like that. Not my main bag though, but I need to consider cash.

I have some other fun ideas for this too, that’s a real nod to the past; a more civilized age.

oftenwrong 8 days ago

I used to use uMatrix and would often disable CSS, but enable necessary JS. This allowed most sites to work properly while displaying them in a plain HTML look that I prefer. I think what you are describing is aimed at a similar end result, but would require less faff.

  • keepamovin 8 days ago

    Basically, yes. Also, disabling some CSS breaks sites whose usability depends on layout. This tries to preserve layout.

jzellis 8 days ago

I'm all about it! I'm old enough to remember text only browsing and there's a lot of use cases I can think of for this for myself at least.

javierluraschi 8 days ago

I’m not, but LLMs could use this browser.