← Back to context

Comment by mrcslws

7 days ago

If you can SSH to a machine, you can use Outer Loop and Outer Shell, without having to do any sudo commands or expose anything new to the network. The browser + SSH client combined into a single app leads to nice user experiences like this. The final section of the post was saying that it's strange such a thing doesn't exist already.

FYI I made the same ActiveX connection here in the closing of the FAQ in the previous blog post about this native platform: https://probablymarcus.com/blocks/2026/05/10/like-a-web-view... I'm particularly proud of that paragraph.

> without having to do any sudo commands or expose anything new to the network.

Again I'm not understanding the distinction. I don't need to run sudo commands to install a web server, and depending on your definition of "exposing something new" to the network then either I don't have to do that either or your solution also does that.

Something is getting downloaded and run on the remote machine, correct? Why is it problematic for that something to be a web server (with SSH-forwarding I guess) instead of this custom thing?

And why install anything on the server at all if it'll just serve a binary that downloads and runs on your local computer anyway? For example, if I type `sftp://username@server.domain/file/path` into my file manager's address bar, I get the nice file browsing experience you demonstrate without installing anything on my computer or the server.

EDIT: OK, after reading through your earlier posts, I think the value proposition really is just that you've implemented a slightly better UX for proxying remote web servers via ssh, and that the "run native code" thing is an independent idea you are also pursuing. So the answer to the question "isn't this just proxying an http server over ssh" is basically yes.

I think I incorrectly read this as attempting to propose a radically new idea and not as an incremental improvement to the status quo.

  • > it requires exposing a port to the internet or using some SSH port forwarding tool

    I think what they meant is that the SSH server can be behind your webserver and not have to have its own public IP exposed directly... but of course there are an abundance of proxy-related solutions already.