I’ve been noticing how modern websites, with all their heavy JavaScript and media, can bog down local machines. It got me thinking, could a remote browser exist that runs the actual rendering and computation server-side, while you interact with it from a lightweight client, almost like a “thin web client”?
Is this something that already exists?
How would such a setup work in practice? Are there any protocols, tools, or services that enable this kind of browser offloading?
Curious to hear if anyone’s explored this.
Yep, this concept totally exists, and it’s been getting more attention lately as websites get heavier.
One way to think about it is like how LambdaTest work: they spin up real browsers in the cloud that you can control from your own machine.
I’ve used them mostly for testing across environments, but in theory, the same idea could work for general browsing, you’re just sending inputs (clicks, scrolls) and receiving a video stream + DOM events back.
@mehta_tvara I actually messed around with something similar using Xpra and Chrome headless on a VPS.
It wasn’t super elegant, but it let me offload browser sessions from a Pi to a beefier cloud box.
There’s also VNC and RDP, but those are less optimized for video and input latency.
I think the closest polished approach is remote browser isolation platforms used in enterprise environments, mostly for security, but performance benefits come as a bonus.
This is big in the cybersecurity space too.
A lot of orgs use cloud-hosted browsers to isolate risky content.
You’re basically interacting with a video stream while all the rendering happens remotely.
Some services do this via WebRTC or other low-latency protocols.
It’s a cool solution for legacy hardware or locked-down environments, though it’s still niche for everyday users because of cost and bandwidth needs.