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Show HN: Web proxy in iframe with Flash and incognito tabs (dosyago.com)
25 points by graderjs on Jan 18, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments



# How to try it

Click the "Try right now" to start a browser in an iframe at the bottom of the page.

Unfortunately for those of us (myself included) living outside of North America, the server is in Newark, NJ. So lag will be network-based.

# Source code

This work is based on this project on GitHub:

https://github.com/i5ik/Viewfinder

Your demo version has many advanced features (listed in the comparison table[0]), including Flash.

# Using Flash

Just go to a page that (still) uses Flash, or click one of the SWF links on the homepage, or a SWF link anywhere.

The a flash integration is thanks to the wonderful Ruffle Flash emulator project, written in Rust[1].

# Project background

This was originally created as a delivery layer for a web-scraping app that was supposed to work on any device without download, but I broke it out into its own product as it just has too many interesting use cases, some ideas for which are here[2]

# Current tasks

I have some customers for the managed individual version (the 15, and 57 a month in the link above), as well as for the self-hosted licensed versions. Right now my focus should be on polish and improving styles and marketing, but I guess I just love building features and fixing bugs. But marketing is essential...

# What is this really?

You can say it's a "remote isolated browser" but really that's just one application that can be built with this browser-based application virtualization technology. I'm thinking about fully open-sourcing the regular version on GitHub above, but I'm worried about the risk where someone will just take it and make a well-marketed cloud service out of it and not have to pay me. I've got it on a Polyform non-commercial license now...I like it but I wish I knew a better option...Maybe tho as I get more successful with it, I won't worry about this so much.

# Easter egg (coming in like 10 minutes)

Finally, if you want to try to co-browsing feature, there's an easter egg. After you opened a browser, just double-tap or right-click or long-hold anywhere on the top of this landing page and it should try to share the cobrowsing session invite link, or copy it to the clipboard. You can send that to someone and when they open it you will both be driving the same browser session.

[0]: https://github.com/i5ik/Viewfinder/blob/boss/README.md#vf-pr...

[1]: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

[2]: https://github.com/i5ik/Viewfinder/blob/boss/README.md#appli...


Does this mean I can multiple tabs in a browser but all with different proxies?

Nice work btw, this is impressive.


Sure, say you wanted 3 different proxies, you could create 1 VF instance each per proxy, and connect to each one in a different browser tab.

You could also just have 3 iframes in the same tab.


Just a quick note to anyone reading this who's interested in automation. There's a "Puppeteer Script console" under the Menu -> Scripting tab. You can run Puppeteer scripts in a NodeJS sandbox that are automatically connected to your remote browser.

Personally I really like the possibilities of this interactive way of instrumenting an iframe from within the iframe.


Public service announcement: I'm switching off the demo in a little bit of time.

Edit: demo is switched off. But you can still try a version of the software here:

https://github.com/i5ik/Viewfinder

It doesn't have an the Pro features, but you can set it up for free. Just follow the instructions in the repo! :) ;P xx ;p

Also the GitHub version is currently free to use for governments, non profits and other non commercial endeavors.


"The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy"

Thanks, Hacker News :)


I did that silly thing where you think, "I'm going to just make this tiny fix on my live demo." And of course the fix had unintended consequences. Despite the usage spike... I think my "fix" (that I'm now frantically working to "fix again") is contributing to the instability.


I'm so confused. Why do I want Flash?


And even if you do want it, you can always just install the Ruffle extension[1]

I, too, was surprised about Flash. I'm an older dev but I never got into Flash in the heyday of the 90s internet. Weird right? So many people were really into using Flash games and apps, I just completely ignored it. Only since Flash End-of-Life prompted multiple people to contact me asking if this VF browser could support Flash.

At first I dismissed this as just a really niche and weird use case. But over time, and more and more people asking about this I thought, "maybe I'm missing something here." So I looked into it and discovered Ruffle, which is basically a massive project with 100s of thousands of users. It's also pretty cool.

And then, finally, 20 years after the heyday, I started trying out Flash games and movies and apps for this integration. And I found out they're actually really cool. There's a whole deep reservoir of really creative, and moving, and entertaining content that was expressed in Flash--and tho I'm sure this must be obvious to some people--I was never aware of it.

So why do I want Flash? Indeed, it's the question you ask before you realize how cool Flash, or the Flash content, really is. Maybe you look at that and still think Flash is not for you, but at least then you can appreciate why so many people love it.

[1]: https://ruffle.rs/#usage




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