Greenfield Is Still Progressing As An HTML5 In-Browser Wayland Compositor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Greenfield Is Still Progressing As An HTML5 In-Browser Wayland Compositor

Two years ago we covered Greenfield as an in-browser HTML5-based Wayland compositor. While at first it may seem like just a short-lived toy, it turns out the project is still around and advancing with its functionality for running Wayland apps inside modern web browsers without any browser plug-ins...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Greenfield-2019-Browser-Wayland

[zubzub]

Author here.

Talk available here: https://mirror.as35701.net/video.fos...greenfield.mp4

Feel free to update the article.

Erik

[microcode]

Bizarre, but fun. :- )

[kmare]

Definitely interesting work!

PS: you can see a small demo at 22:00 in the video.

[Guest]

Bizarre, but fun. :- )

Alternative to remote desktop? Quick administration of remote servers without need to install any client locally.

[ElectricPrism]

Alternative to remote desktop? Quick administration of remote servers without need to install any client locally.

Too bad Wayland Protocol doesn't include Client / Server like relations IIUC.

[boxie]

Author here.

Talk available here: https://mirror.as35701.net/video.fos...greenfield.mp4

Feel free to update the article.

Erik

Hey man, nice work!

This seems like it could be really cool and have plenty of awesome potential!

[6L3ZZ]

This is very interesting. The functionality is a bit like the gnome broadway backend that lets gnome applications be rendered on an HTML5 canvas. I have some uses for this kind of functionality but was staying away from broadway as its gnome specific. If greenfield works works with anything that can use wayland then it could be exactly what I wanted.

[Delgarde]

Too bad Wayland Protocol doesn't include Client / Server like relations IIUC.

Kind of. It doesn't include remoting at the lowest levels of the protocol, unlike X11 – and that's probably a good thing, since the X11 approach didn't really keep up with modern requirements, having been designed when the state of the art was 1-bit color and simple line drawing, rather than streaming HD video. But Wayland does leave room for remoting protocols to be developed at the compositor layer.

The problem is that so far, nobody seems to have put serious work into actually designing and implementing such protocols (though there have been a few efforts in the related topic of screen-sharing). I suspect that a lot of the use-cases for X11 remoting have changed or disappeared over the years... e.g. servers are often administered through web interfaces now (if not SSH), and I'm not going to rely on X11 access to a server if I'm connecting from a laptop which can go off-network (I'm more likely to run a VNC server that I can safely connect and disconnect from). Ten to fifteen years ago, I used X11 remoting constantly at work – today, almost never.

[yoshi314]

why would this be considered a toy? this might be a very useful remote desktop solution, just not sure how good it is on bandwidth side.