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Comment by tombh | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for your advice, it's really helpful. I agree, I think it has a large gimmick factor, for which I don't think there's a huge amount of $ (though it does help spread the word). You have a good point about finding a niche in a large company. As others have mentioned this looks like it would be to do with endeavours out in the field so to speak, where the Internet is slow and/or expensive. So eg; military or shipping operations.

So at the moment I guess it's just best to hope as many different people and organisations see Browsh as possible and seeing what sticks and where.

I've got Patreon, Paypal and Bitcoin setup already: https://www.brow.sh/donate/

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I think your niche might be companies or professionals that need to communicate via satellite while 'out in the field'. For my job I need to take an Inmarsat BGAN terminal with me on trips into the backcountry so I can pull up a data connection wherever I happen to be. Obviously the data is very expensive. To limit costs, I check my email via SSH using Pine and basic web browsing with Lynx. Regular web browsing in Chrome is slow and very expensive. Your browser represents a huge step up from Lynx.

The maritime industry could find a large benefit from using your software. A friend of mine is a marine electrician who often works on large commercial boats up in Alaska. Some of these boats will pay in the neighborhood of $7000 per month for satellite service and unless you're the captain you get very limited access time. I'm sure they'd be interested in cutting their web browsing costs.

That's an excellent point. Reduce cost of "$xxx" to $x" by filtering / proxying through legible text. And yes. A return to the web's roots. I applaud the author b/c I have constantly wanted to do this same hack, but would never have done it to this level.

Wouldnt it make more sense to build this as a cloud service?

So you connect (using ssh or chrome) to a dedicated host which sends you a digest of the page...

You can also "zoom in" on elements if you want higher resolution.

As a potential user, what are your opinions ?

(Sort of like the Amazon Silk browser..?!)

Edit: phrasing, and also looked at other comments

> Wouldnt it make more sense to build this as a cloud service?

Definitely. Maritime companies and backcountry users probably won't be interested in messing around with a nifty open source tool nor the hosting infrastructure it'd require. They'll want this built out as a secure easy to use service.

@tombh Feel free to get in touch if you're interested in building or optimizing for satellite users. I'd be happy to provide some beta test feedback using my equipment.

Definitely interested in this. It's exactly the thing that I imagined Browsh excelling at. I'm tom at tombh.co.uk

Add links to Patreon, PayPal, and Bitcoin right on the home page.

Woah, yeah, bold, why not.

I stepped up, now a Patron.

Thank you very much.

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