[BRLTTY] Is there a feature-compatible text-based browser

[kperry at blinksoft.com]

Dynamic pages is one reason I want to use curses.  You will need to be able
to get changes show changes and let people review them.   Scrolling console
will not work for all that.   I had done my  demo using selenium but you are
correct Playwrite might be a better choice especially since it has an
accessibility tree built into the system.  It also is faster I can probably
switch to that in a day or two.  I would like to support chromium, firefox,
and webkit all as backends so you could quickly switch and reload pages.
Once I get something people can play with I will probably push it to my
github. 



-----Original Message-----
From: BRLTTY <brltty-bounces at brltty.app> On Behalf Of Aura Kelloniemi
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2025 2:51 AM
To: 'Informal discussion between users and developers of BRLTTY.'
<brltty at brltty.app>
Subject: Re: [BRLTTY] Is there a feature-compatible text-based browser

Hi list,

On 2025-09-16 at 19:41 -0400, <kperry at blinksoft.com> wrote:
 > Recently I even made two test versions using different automation sweets
> and chromium back end for chrom.

I would stay away from Google browsers for security reasons, but I don't
know if Firefox is any better in reality. Web safety requires disabling
JavaScript which then defeats the whole purpose of a modern browser.

PlayWright might be a good way to interface with the browser. It allows
choosing the backe-nd browser.

 > It would use Python as a front end, and it would be configurable.

This is a good idea. I would suggest using notcurses (or something else
written in C) as a terminal access library.

I have used prompt-toolkit in a personal project and my experience is that
it is slow, even in IPython.

 > It sounds like Nickolas already has a start on a firefox one, but I am
not  > a fan of the Lynx interface. I would do it more ncurses based which
would  > make it portable and easy to configure.

I don't like Lynx either. Also I want to note that using a modern browser
through a HTTP proxy is going to be very challenging if one wants to use any
form of dynamic pages, especially SPAs (Single page applications).
Unfortunately web is nowadays full of SPAs written using different JS
libraries. These absolutely require dynamic rendering of the page contents.
I wonder how Lynx could send single key events to pages and rerender them as
the page contents change based on input events.

--
Aura
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