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May 10, 2005
Bitty Browser
Posted by Stowe Boyd
David Weinberger mentioned the Bitty browser, so I thought I would fiddle with it. If you click on the following you will pop open a browser window that is populated by RSS from a Travel blog I set up.
Pretty nifty little widget. I am going to use it for my travel blog browser, which is going over in the left margin.
Comments (3)
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1. johno on May 14, 2005 04:08 PM writes...
see that the iframe tag they provide you with has a url pointing to their site. Seems that "embeded browser" might just be a fancy name for an iframe?
Yikes! Best of luck to them. Hope they have a good server cluster.
Posted by: johno on May 14, 2005 03:42 PM
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In fact, this is the essence of their "embedded browser":
iframe width="400" height="500" src="http://b1.bitty.com/browser/"
At first I though maybe bitty serves up an html page that loads into the ifmame with javascript that controls either another iframe or a frame? Looks like they have the right-click menu disabled so it is hard to tell. Thinking more... I am not even sure this requires and DHTML? You would only need javascript that sets the href for the frame/iframe, no DHTML. Hmmm, wait the "Menu" and "Open URL" pages in are just served up from bitty and loaded into the iframe.
http://b1.bitty.com/browser/openurl/
http://b1.bitty.com/browser/menu/
Wait, these are ASP server pages! Try:
http://b1.bitty.com/browser/openurl/?a=0
These pages are passed the id you included on the iframe url "a=0824903D...". Hmm, and "openurl" has a cleverly hidden form that posts your url request back to bitty with the id.
I smell smoke... and mirrors.
Get Real is right!!
Permalink to Comment2. tony on May 14, 2005 04:09 PM writes...
Wait a minute, let me get this straight, here it is 2005, and we are getting all excited about an iframe and request snooping 'service'? Show me the VC money and we've got 1998 all over again!
Permalink to Comment3. johno on May 14, 2005 06:32 PM writes...
The fact is that anyone skilled in javascript and html can implement the functionality of the bitty browser with an iframe, some basic javascript, and a couple of html pages hosted on their own server. One of the authors, Scott, claims good intentions, but I can't see any reason for the use of server side processing.
kWhy track the user requests at all? Why submit each request to the bitty server in an obscured form hidden in the openurl page? Why not just serve the frame wrapper, menu, toolbar and openurl pages as static html pages? Anyone could then install the code on their server, without the need for the bitty server at all.
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