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.
https://www.browserless.io/blog/2024/02/21/rebuilding-browserless/In the spirit of open source, I want to share the process as well as the product. Here's the story of our full rewrite for v2 of Browserless, down to building our own custom libraries and routing.
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.
Sorry, it won’t happen again.
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
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
https://github.com/browserless/chrome/blob/5627f1ef041ec23f3...
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
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 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.
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’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!
We use docker-machine at browserless.io for a lot of dev stuff, and noticed that new create calls weren’t working. It appears that docker version 20.10.0 has some kind of issue when docker-machine copies over configuration to the daemon.Workaround is to use a custom engine URL, eg https://releases.rancher.com/install-docker/19.03.9.shGH issue: https://github.com/docker/machine/issues/4858
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.