>This port cost over 25k in opus/fable tokens for debugging and JIT research<p>> This was just a fun experiment to push the boundaries of WebAssembly<p>I'm a huge fan of the project, but I have to ask. If spending $25k is a "fun experiment", where exactly is your threshold for serious work?
Was it really $25k, or was it done though subscriptions with a reported cost of $25k?<p>I'm on the openai $100 sub and frequently my codexbar will show $250 usage in a day. I think it probably doesn't have access to the cached token share too, which probably inflates that a lot.
This naturally begs the question, would a human be willing to do the same thing for $25k, and how long would that take?
I imagine it is 25k tokens not dollars
You can't do anything for 25k tokens; I've spent 100m today and the day isn't out yet.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927724">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927724</a> seems to say dollars? Although yes the phrasing could be clearer in the post
I think the system prompt is bigger than that.
That's standard token usage for /init
25k tokens is a few turns
I'm so glad this exists, I've been considering doing something like this for a few months.<p>I recently got a TV based on VIDAA os, a locked-down linux-based OS where everything is rendered from Web pages. It has a built-in browser that doesn't support ad-blocking (I suspect VIDAA is profiting from showing ads on the TV), and you can't install new apps unless they're Web pages.<p>This would hopefully allow one to run Firefox within the existing browser, then install uBlock Origin within Firefox... I know what this weekend's project is going to be...
We also plan on adding extension support to <a href="https://github.com/HeyPuter/browser.js" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/HeyPuter/browser.js</a> soon, which should hopefully cover use cases like that as well without the full overhead
Firefox should really bundle ublock origin as-is. I install it afterwards anyway but I don't understand Mozilla here. They seem to want to stay behind Google.
In 2024, "search royalties" brought in approximately $585 million for Mozilla, largely from Google. It's not hard to see why they tread very lightly around ad blocking. It's actually impressive that ublock remains easy and painless to install as an extension.
They already bundle Brave’s rust-based ad-blocker:<p><a href="https://shivankaul.com/blog/firefox-bundles-adblock-rust" rel="nofollow">https://shivankaul.com/blog/firefox-bundles-adblock-rust</a>
Oh and for anyone asking, you can run firefox-wasm inside firefox-wasm inside firefox! I only got this to load once though since it gets pretty unstable at that level.
It's kind of ironic how this doesn't work in Firefox.
I can’t help but think of Gary Bernhardt’s 2014 talk, “The Birth and Death of JavaScript”: <a href="https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript" rel="nofollow">https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...</a>
Browser sandboxing is now fully solved.
In mean... It kinda feels like this is legitimately true? An attacker trying to do anything on a user's machine through this would have to find a Firefox vulnerability and a vulnerability in the wasm runtime, which is such a high bar that I would actually feel remarkably safe running this thing. The only question is how performance works and whether there are any pain points using as a daily driver, but those feel likely to be a pretty minor point. Oh, and the usual caveat that an attacker can still compromise things inside the sandbox which does leave a certain amount of exposure (but if you run different things in different instances they're isolated).
Assuming you're running Firefox as the outer browser too, in theory it only needs a single bug in the wasm runtime, plus a sandbox escape.
This is true but also this is probably also only half true. Sandboxing is not a fully solved issue since this 100% degrades firefox sandboxing since fission cant run and its running in singleprocess mode. Just wanted to be honest about this
I've been waiting for this to happen.<p>The websites that don't want you to block ads will serve you an obfuscated "inner browser" that will render their site. All your ad blockers, etc, are rendered moot.<p>Once accessibility is solved this is absolutely going to be a thing on major websites.
Can’t get it running on Firefox 152.0.6 (aarch64), no extensions.<p><pre><code> [chrome-demo] chrome assets ready
[gecko] warning: unsupported syscall: __syscall_madvise
[gecko] embed-xul: main() on the app pthread (PROXY_TO_PTHREAD)
[gecko] embed-xul: GECKO_GL_PASSTHROUGH=1
[gecko] embed-xul: GECKO_COARSE_CLOCK=1
[gecko] embed-xul: GECKO_GPU=1 (GPU/WebRender->canvas rendering)
[gecko] xul_init: GRE dir = /gre
[gecko] Pthread 0x11051000 sent an error! blob:https://developer.puter.com/edc1bd0a-b844-4a18-a69a-63dd49dc304a:8906: SecurityError: Security error when calling GetDirectory</code></pre>
Prior art: WebKit.js, the WebKit rendering engine ported to JS<p><a href="https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js/</a>
on mobile chrome / Android I can't get the following to work :<p>- IME / keyboard doesn't pop on any field<p>- copy paste<p>- scrolling with touch<p>- ai side panel<p>What works on mobile :<p>- Extensions !<p>This is so sick great work; did you try webgpu?<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/nWFCraP" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/nWFCraP</a>
25k tokens to port Firefox to WASM. by 2027 we'll be spending 25k tokens to port WASM back to native because someone will benchmark it and find the WASM version is 3% faster.
All the network traffic from that browser is routed through a server. My IP inside that browser was in India and on CloudFlare network. I don’t particularly trust Puter. Why not route traffic through my actual browser?
this should be documented with highlight to prevent anyone trying to leak some personal information.<p>i never did some wasm but seems it runs quite fast on my macmini m1
Because the web browser can't make arbitrary network connections. Even if it was implemented intercepting at the HTTP layer (which would probably be much more difficult than just intercepting the low level socket operations) you wouldn't be able to properly manage CORS headers, cookies and various other things.
The TCP proxy exit node we're using is running on Cloudflare, you can check that your traffic is still TLS encrypted by OpenSSL (also compiled to webassembly). The browser does not have a native API to send raw TCP so the proxying is done by the <a href="http://github.com/MercuryWorkshop/wisp-protocol" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/MercuryWorkshop/wisp-protocol</a> protocol. You can check your packets in dev tools, look for a socket connection with "puter.cafe" as the host for our TCP proxy. This application is meant to be a demo for it actually (why it says at the bottom that its powered by puter networking). That is the only server side component of this.
I was reading your landing page at <a href="https://developer.puter.com/networking/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.puter.com/networking/</a> and was <i>very</i> confused by how you were achieving the "with no server or proxy" part, until much further down the page:<p>> "the connection is tunneled over a single WebSocket to a Puter relay"<p>Come on, it's both a server and a proxy, and it doesn't stop being those things just because you're calling it a relay.
I wrote that and I think you're right. We were trying to convey that you don't need to set up anything, but the wording could definitely be better. I'll change it.
apologies yes there is a wording error here, the correct wording is no CORS proxy, the reason why this is important is because cors proxies are inherently insecure (this is different because the TLS is done in your browser with a webassembly library).<p>no servers is referring to you not needing to host servers in the same as the term "serverless". Such is the ways of modern tech terms I fear
>Why not route traffic through my actual browser?<p>Because you can't. Not even an Extension is able to. Browsers don't want you to bypass their content enforcement. I wish we had at least one hacker friendly browser.
Extensions can't, correct but I wanted to bring up a special case regarding this<p><i>Isolated web apps</i> a chrome feature for developing apps that run in chromium based on HTML (but tbh only really used in Chromebooks) <i>do</i> support raw TCP sockets so if this was ported to an IWA you could have Firefox on a Chromebook without an external server needed.
Puter's networking is open-source and e2e encrypted. Also, a regular browser doesn't give access to raw TCP sockets used for this, so it wouldn't be possible to route through your browser.
So it's just the three accounts you have now? (Show by @coolelectronics now and 7 months ago [1], show from you/@ent101 2d ago [0], 2025[2,3,4], 2024[5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D], 2023[E], @george0812 2022[F])<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895945">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895945</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=coolelectronics">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=coolelectronics</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522061">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522061</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193514">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193514</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675696">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675696</a><p>[5]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41849494">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41849494</a><p>[6]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41682779">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41682779</a><p>[7]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360683">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360683</a><p>[8]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41040761">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41040761</a><p>[9]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802253">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802253</a><p>[A]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39829463">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39829463</a><p>[B]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39672886">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39672886</a><p>[C]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39597030">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39597030</a><p>[D]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39036897">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39036897</a><p>[E]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38202220">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38202220</a><p>[F]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31611016">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31611016</a>
What makes it require that WASM extension you need the flag for in Firefox? Was there really no way to work around it or polyfill it for it to work? It is performance critical?
I would be careful with this demo. When you go to whatismyip.com, it's showing: 104.28.233.73. Someone could use this to cloak their IP address and do some damage.
The description mentions a similar project browser.js which apparently has some real use cases, what are they?
edit: I misunderstood, that's $25k not 25k tokens :/ time to log off.<p>this is so rad! 25k tokens is a lot less than i thought this'd take -- what were the difficult bits in the porting process? also, was firefox preferred because parts of it are already in rust?
$25k of tokens, closer to 30 billion I believe. It only took a few days to actually get the engine up, the hard parts where most of the effort was spent was squeezing out performance and increasing stability, as well as attempting the JIT.<p>Firefox was chosen because its single-process support was in a better place than chromium/blink. WebKit is also possible, it was done by a friend of mine earlier <a href="https://github.com/theogbob/WebkitWasm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/theogbob/WebkitWasm</a>
> There is a novel WASM->JS JIT for experimental site speedup<p>I would love to see the details for this. SpiderMonkey had an attempted wasm32 JIT backend, but it was never finished.<p>edit: Apparently it also has some sort of WebAssembly interpreter backend too, which SpiderMonkey doesn't have.
Obligatory <a href="https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript" rel="nofollow">https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...</a>
This is amazing. I loaded up <a href="https://developer.puter.com/labs/firefox-wasm/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.puter.com/labs/firefox-wasm/</a> in Chrome and I've visited a bunch of sites, it works really well.<p>Then I opened up <a href="https://developer.puter.com/labs/firefox-wasm/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.puter.com/labs/firefox-wasm/</a> in Firefox-in-WebAssembly-in-Chrome<p>... and sadly it didn't load. I got this in the startup log:<p><pre><code> [log] [chrome-demo] chrome assets ready
[warn] [gecko] warning: unsupported syscall: __syscall_madvise</code></pre>
"Yo dawg. I herd you like web browsers, so I put a browser in your browser, so you can browse the Web while you browse the Web".
No mobile support
... doesn't support Firefox mobile apparently :D
"This browser doesn't support WebAssembly JSPI, which Firefox WASM needs to run."
[dead]