[shrek]

I stumbled across this on the blog of a YouTuber named Bryan Lunduke who covers a variety of tech related topics. Browservice lets you load up modern sites using browsers as old Internet Explorer 4 on operating systems like Windows 3.11 for workgroups. What I've gathered from reading the blog post and Github page is that it uses a Linux machine to do the heavy lifting and sends a simplified version of the site you want to access to the older browser. It's not just an image either. You can click stuff and interact with modern sites, copy/paste, and even download files. The downsides are that you don't get audio and can't upload files. I'm not home right now so I can't test it myself on my Octane but it might work. This seems like a more elegant solution than simply forwarding an application over X11 since you can use a native browser. Does anyone want to try this out? Is it a possible solution to the web browser problem on IRIX? 

https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice
https://lunduke.com/posts/2020-06-30/

[Trippynet]

That does look pretty cool, and less crude than WRP. I'll have to give it a try some time. Good find!!

[kaigan]

I actually watch a lot of Lunduke's stuff, but when I originally heard about this, I actually thought it was the same thing as WRP, so I kinda overlooked it. I'll definitely play around with it when I can.

[ducks]

Tried it and it actually works quite well. (Writing this post through browservice). Setup a CentOS VM running browservice located remote (through a vpn). It is not lightning fast, but very usable. Even complex stuff like o365 excel works fine. I am using a modern browser for the test as I don't have my sgi here atm.

[Noguri]

Tested on my Octane2:

- not working with Netscape 4.8
- working pretty fine with Firefox 3.0.19

[hamei]

I guess I am missing something ? If you have to run the program on a remote computer, and if it's Linux, why not just rlogion to the Linux box and run something like

prompt > fireflop -display irixbox:0

I mean, we have X and everything .....

[ducks]

On my test setup browservice was actually quicker compared to x forwarding. I'll try this weekend with IRIX on the same network to see which is faster.

[ducks]

Tried it on my Tezro. Browservice is significantly faster compared to x forwarding. Latest Firefox crashes within seconds. Chromium works better, but once you open up a refresh heavy site (YouTube) the browser becomes unresponsive and X has issues releasing the focus from the browser. Browservice remains responsive under these conditions. Works with mozilla 1.7.2 (The one that comes with 6.5.30)

[shrek]

Thank you both for testing this out. I can't wait to try it for myself. 

[hamei]

Peripheral to the subject but I finally got disgusted enough with those stinking overlays to turn off javascript again.

Working so far.

If they keep it up, these people will ruin the web.