How can we get this project thriving?

[tobimensch]

A nice small community has developed around browsh, but it currently looks like @tombh's current job related lack of coding contributions can't be compensated easily.

@j-rewerts and others are working on improving the documentation and developer tools.

We did get a significant influx of people, after the articles on phoronix and other sites got published. Informing some more news sites about browsh would be a useful contribution.

Maybe we can get significant tech channels on youtube to showcase browsh?

What are the missing features holding back people from embra
cing browsh besides the obvious vim mode #31 ?

Maybe we should work to get browsh inside the standard repositories of major distros such as Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. If it's easy to install and try, the likelihood of people using it and eventually becoming developers should increase.

What else could we do to get this project moving faster?

I'm assigning myself to this issue, since helping to develop a community and to speed up the development has been a focus of mine for a while now. Who else wants to get assigned to this issue?

[j-rewerts]

I'd love to be involved! Let me know how I can help grow the community! I'll be giving a talk on OSS and Browsh next month to some students.

It would be a huge help to have someone else that is strong with Go in the community. I'm learning, but can't dedicate more than ~10 hours per week.

[j-rewerts]

One of the things that I think is interesting about Browsh is that everyone I've shown it to immediately wants to use the HTTP-based mode. At work, all of the interest stems from the web browser based approach.

I think Browsh could potentially have value to non-developers, particularly people in low income situations. If we can start telling that story, I could see it attracting more people.

The 2 uses I'm exploring at work are Browsh over a low power, wide area network (LoRa) and P2P Browsh. Both could end up being stories that attract more people to the community.

[tobimensch]

@j-rewerts
Nice to know you'll be promoting browsh in a talk! Could you capture your talk on video and post it online?

I agree the http-server-mode is a huge selling point, although currently it's lacking in many basic areas such as links.

[j-rewerts]

That's a great idea! I'll ask the organisers and see.

As for http-server-mode, I'll try to start contributing more on that side.

[tombh]

So happy to see this issue here. I wish I could be more involved at the moment, but I'm so consumed by this new job :/

I think all the ideas mentioned here will help. The way I see it is that the best thing to promote is the thing that most interests you. There are so many avenues that Browsh can down. In fact recently I've had 2 emails from 2 different blind users, which is just so exciting to know that Browsh could help them. So all of these little things together will slowly help get Browsh known by the people who need to know. Don't underestimate the small-scale exposure!

[j-rewerts]

Good news @tobimensch! We're live streaming the prezzy here.

Time:
Mountain/Alberta Time: 6:00 - 9:30 PM, Sep. 12, 2018 Tuesday
Eastern Time: 8:00 - 11:30 PM
Pacific Time: 5:00 - 8:30 PM
Beijing Time: 8:00 -11:30 AM, Sep. 13, 2018 Wednesday

My part will be between 7:45 and 8:05 Mountain time. Will be talking about a few different potential use cases for Browsh we're exploring!

I'll look into whether we can record it and post after the fact too (not too sure if zoom.us already does this or not).

[tobimensch]

@j-rewerts
Awesome. Unless @tombh has already held a presentation about Browsh, that I don't know about, you might very well be the first person in the world to do so.

All use cases from the top of my head:

• lynx/w3m/links aren't always successful with rendering websites as they were intended by designers. Or webpages don't work at all, because of missing features.
• Using firefox's rendering engine from the console, which wasn't possible until now
• When used over SSH/Mosh you can save a ton of bandwidth and stay within strict volume limits. You can also keep using the web comfortably once your connection is really bad.
• With the http service and the remote server the same applies.
• Due to all text getting standardized to one monospace font, Browsh gives the web a unique look. Some people might prefer this uniform look of web pages.
• In the future integrating Browsh into other console applications, like Emacs might be possible.
• Some people might prefer to do everything possible in the console/terminal, because they hate GUIs. This wouldn't really have been feasible with lynx, w3m or links.
• Using Firefox's grown rendering engine on a headless server. Of course you can setup X.org with VNC, but getting Browsh to work may simply be a more straightforward setup.
• Converting web pages into plain text. Especially using monochrome mode. This could be the first step for some scraping tools.

Definitely remind them, that Browsh's rendering of Firefox's rendering can still improve. We have open issues for improved graphics rendering #86, #104. There're misaligned text fragments sometimes, that are hopefully fixable. @tombh wanted to work on a magnifying glass tool, to make a it possible to solve captchas and the like, #33. This is also something links, w3m or lynx could never do.

The http service is only a skeleton of what it could be in the future. I think it will become a transparent http proxy.

My hope is that we'll develop a graphical Browsh client without the limitations of the console/terminal or graphical browsers as the platform. This would allow to optimize for speed and bandwidth, while enabling features like unpixelated image support and filling out forms through forwarding of input events like you can do in the CLI version.

[tobimensch]

@j-rewerts @tombh
I think we should make a release before your presentation so you can show off your latest mouse wheel scroll feature. :-)

I will raise the version number in version.go to do so like @tombh explained here:
#185 (comment)

[tombh]

Excellent summary of Browsh there from @tobimensch. There's still so much work to be done, it's exciting to think where Browsh could be in the next 12 months.

Yes, please do feel free to cut releases.

[ghost]

We did get a significant influx of people, after the articles on phoronix and other sites got published. Informing some more news sites about browsh would be a useful contribution.

I submitted browsh on "Get Featured On It’s FOSS".
Maybe https://itsfoss.com/ will make an article about browsh :)

[tobimensch]

@BO41
Great! This is very helpful. Keep spreading the word. I tested Browsh today on my new and better server and realized how good it actually already is.

[tobimensch]

As of now this project has 9867 stars on GitHub. That is very good and just 133 stars shy of the magical 10000 stars.

Who hasn't starred this project, yet?

This makes Browsh one of the top thousand projects on GitHub judging by the number of stars. This is really great and Browsh is already close to the top 900.

[tobimensch]

We're over 10k stars now! Yay!

[omersiar]

I did get it installed on a intern's Debian Laptop, we both enjoyed poking around Browsh.

[tobimensch]

Finally pushed the vim-mode-experimental branch. Key bindings are generally the same as in vimium, however I changed x for closing tabs to xx, to make accidental tab closing less likely. It's not completely done yet, but does a decent job at removing the need for a mouse.

[tobimensch]

I need some help and feedback here:
#233

[jawz101]

It'd be nice to package it to be able to run the server instance from an Android phone or RaspberryPi.

It would be a neat trick to say that an old Android phone could be a brow.sh server and anything you package as a Raspberry Pi appliance gets a ton of interest (piHole, NextCloudPi, RetroPie)

[GameKyuubi]

Honestly I think the only feature missing from total embracement is Vim mode. Merge that, even if it's not complete, and I suspect this project will get much more use. Until Vim mode is merged I think this project is basically dead.

[alanxoc3]

Is browsh still being worked on? The last release was in 2019, I don't see any commits this year, but I do see some active issues...

[tombh]

I'm the main developer and I just haven't had the time to work on it. BTW I totally agree that a Vim mode would make a huge difference. I wish I'd merged it whilst I still remembered the code base

[alanxoc3]

No worries, I know how that goes. This is a really cool project though, so thanks for what you've done so far.

[tombh]

Thanks so much 🥰 I've most certainly not given up on the project, just could be a while to get back to it