This seems decent in Theory, though I'm not familiar if GraphQL mutations can handle conditionals. Cool idea though, but that might be a deal breaker for a lot of folks
Hey folks, Joel here, I'm the original maker behind browserless. You've seen us before on HN -- I'm very sorry for this situation.
We didn’t intend to SPAM you or send unsolicited emails, we just wanted to ask for feedback. Being an open-source/boostrapped service, feedback is really important for us, so that’s why we thought it might be a good idea to reach out to people directly. But now it's clear that that was a wrong decision. We stopped doing that and won’t do it again.
You’ve got it: the core service listens for inbound Upgrade http requests, starts a browser, then funnels the connection into the browser.
This debugger simply sits on top of all that, and puts the code/execution context in the browser versus the server. Cloud flare is simply detecting that our server IP is a known headless chrome instance, and is serving their bot detection check
You can use our demo debugger (the address is in this blogpost). It might not match your version of puppeteer exactly, but it’s a close enough proximate that it’s still valuable
Yup, There’s a lot going on here. Currently the tool uses a fixed IP for the running browser. That’s why you’re seeing that Cloudflare issue.
As far as the hovering goes, the canvas element is “mirroring” interactions back through to the underlying page. When Devtools are active, this triggers chromium to render hover effects in its GUI. This then gets sent back to the canvas element in the debugging page.
It’s a lot of network traffic and Synchronization... but once everything is setup it works fairly seamlessly
Sure! Puppeteer is a node-based library, and pretty much all the web-apps out there that let you run puppeteer code do it in an elaborate node sandbox. This tool gets around that by running puppeteer in your own browser, making it a lot faster and more secure
Hey, Joel here, mostly responsible for this tool. Happy to answer questions — one thing not well covered is getting puppeteer to run in the browser, especially a webworker. Can talk more about it if there’s interest!
This is exactly the same thought I came to with browserless.io. There simply wasn’t enough traffic to make informed decisions, and when there was it was really silly things (small copy changes and the like).
Eventually we just tore it all out, and never looked back. Improving the product and blogging about our findings are a win-win for us and the ecosystem at large, versus agonizing over traffic and data
> But from a legal perspective that is not even close to the same thing.
Very true. However, my rebuttal would be that the majority of folks reading this are of an engineering background, and seeing the words “no longer open source” can land quite differently.
> This means that Elasticsearch and Kibana will no longer be open source software.
This is categorically not true. The source is open, and will likely always will be. It’s not free for AWS going forward, however. Why is it that Amazon has such a hard time paying for stuff they use and commercialize? There’s no issues here with other providers (GCP, Azure, etc.), so clearly the problem lies with them. While they’re at it, they should also get off this “open and free” high horse they seem to be on. A few patches here and there don’t qualify as big time contributor status. If they want to show that they’re committed, how about the release their infrastructure code that runs all their services? That’d definitely go a lot further than “big bad Elastic changed their license and we’re defending users.” Get outta here with that nonsense, history shows otherwise with all the other tech that’s been ripped off.
I also don’t get all the criticism for Elastic doing this. They own the software, and they can do whatever they want. Should they have done this license from the start? Maybe, but it’s not exactly easy getting a project off the ground without some way to gain attention. If you’ve got no users, you’ve got to show at least what your code is doing, and picking software licenses is not exactly a straightforward task. They changed their license to fight back, and it’s entirely within their right to do so.
Hate to feel like I’m venting, but AWS is being the bully here and feigning that they’re pro-user, which is frustrating to witness.
I think dual licensing is possibly the best way to go, if your product mitigates a risk. It's why we went that way with browserless.io
Truth be told selling a small library probably isn't enough to make significant money on your product since it isn't solving a big enough risk. The risk of forking is fairly low, especially for small to mid sized companies. Larger companies, maybe so since things like security become much more urgent.
It's hard to separate people from their money, but I feel it becomes a lot easier if it offsets a potential risk they're not willing to take. Just my 2 cents.
I’ve seen some of these trends in browserless.io as well. Good thing you went full time back in January! I postponed going full time on browserless until just a few days ago.
I’m still a bit worried about how next year will shake out. Even though there’s some stimulus in place, there’s a cost to them that’ll eventually come to bear. Perhaps not next year, but years after.
I guess there’s always something going on. Good luck and congratulations on your success! Keep listening to your users, and keep innovating!
I suppose it's open core. Open Source is hard because you have to separate people from their money even though the code is "free." I'm not saying it's _the_ answer, but browserless.io isn't VC backed, and it certainly makes more money than most of the Patreon/sponsor models. I understand that it's not just a library, but a full-blown service, which makes it easier to market and sell.
Have you considered a hosted product? I have no idea what your audience is like, but that seems to be where we've had a lot of success. Happy to chat anytime as well: joel at browserless dot io.
My own opinion: I think there is as a marketplace. Years ago when I started browserless.io, I wanted to find a way to sell access to the core image of ours. Docker kinda has/had a marketplace, where you can buy access to curated and secure images, but it didn’t get any support or news on it. Because of this we went the open-code route and just sold licenses. Too bad because I’d much rather have had a marketplace to do this instead.
You can pretty much just create a free plan and run this in our debugger, which will compile the chapters and return PDF. Pretty fun little challenge.