Thank you for posting that link, I did not see that. I love a bit of competitive analysis, and staying in touch with what possible competition is doing.

When I posted a remote browser project similar to this Show HN, some time ago, Joel mentioned on the thread he might like to work together and to email him. I mailed him, then followed up, but he never replied. I guess he didn't mean what he said. Maybe he got told he wasn't allowed to work with me!

But looking at this link, this look fantastic! I love the design of browserless overall, and how Joel has built it into a thrumping business. Totally thrumping!

Architecturally, it looks to be a custom reworking of chrome-devtools-frontend (I guess the viewport is adapted or spliced directly out of the devtools frontend viewport, but maybe nto) and integrating with the puppeteer window, at least on the front-end.

And it's a high coincidence that we both released a similar thing within 1 month. I did not see his thing lately, and did not directly reference it consciously as inspiration for what I built, but I believe I've seen this thing before, maybe about a year ago (if it existed in some form then? or maybe that was another site) -- so maybe there was some inspiration about putting all these parts together from that, operating for me.

I love the look of his puppeteer debugger console, his is much more polished that mine :)

Some things I noticed about https://chrome.browserless.io

- after using it for a bit the actual tab in my browser crashed with error "STATUS_BREAKPOINT"

- Does not work on Mobile, it loaded, and ran the script, but I couldn't type into the editor on my Android phone

- I tried to bork it with while(true) page.browser().newPage() it seemed OK

- I tried to bork it with a bandwidth speedtest, it seemed OK

- No multiple tabs

- No back buttons, so I needed to go to console to history.back()

- No paste into page, no right-click context menu

- Did not raise a pseudo-modal for remote page modal dialogs, I assume it silently closes them. I.e. https://infosimples.github.io/detect-headless/

- Fails (or passes, depending on your perspective) the "Are you Headless?" test at https://arh.antoinevastel.com/bots/areyouheadless

- Did not raise a pseudo-modal for remote page file chooser dialogs, I assume it silently closes them. I.e. https://blueimp.github.io/jQuery-File-Upload/

- Appears to close the browser every time you press the |> play button. I think that makes debugging fluid.

- Does not raise a pseudo-modal for remote page basic auth modal dialogs, it seems to silently close them. I.e https://jigsaw.w3.org/HTTP/Basic/ (at https://jigsaw.w3.org/HTTP/)

All in all I love how the DevTools window is integrated with the page, even tho it does eat up screen real-estate, it's ok. I also love how product-focused Joel is and how the provided scripts are really laser focused on the use cases of his customers. That's what I think is Joel's biggest strength, how much of a good businessman he is, how focussed on his customers he is, and how he delivers that value for them. That's also what I think is my biggest weakness. Compared to how he's building products and features, I'm like wandering around in the dark shining my flashlight on whatever looks interesting to me. I'm not so honed and focused toward satisfying a specific customer goal, I guess, and that's to my detriment, I think. Design is another weakness I have. But we shall see how things go!

Maybe I'll catch up to him. Maybe I'll overtake him! But I'm not sure that side of the business, "puppeteer automation at scale" is necessarily what I want to go into. We'll see what happens tho! :)