[HOWTO] Opening Websites without any risk to your system

[Rava]

Just in case you are unsure about a website and do not want to risk your own system but still want to see what's there, you can use e.g.

https://www.browserling.com/

Unlike what they claim, you do not " Get a browser and start testing in 5 seconds! " - you go into a queue and it can take up to a few minutes, and then the result will be presented to you for max of 3 minutes.
When you use it as free user without anything of a paid premium thingy, that is.

If you want to check out any internet site without risk, you can use it for free - but bring patience with you.

[Kulle]

Alternatively you can also use onworks.net:
https://www.onworks.net/
There you can choose a distribution, for example zorin, ubuntu etc.
and then use the included browser.

[Rava]

https://www.onworks.net/
There you can choose a distribution, for example zorin, ubuntu etc.
and then use the included browser.

(highlighting by me)

That's a nice touch. Thanks for the find.

Added in 6 minutes 12 seconds:
But… it seems onworks.net/ only offers preview runs of their server variants?
Where is the option to have a sandboxed browser opening the URL I specify for me and displaying that URL?
I had tried the kodi one, but it was closed too quick to try anything on it.

[Kulle]

https://www.onworks.net/os-distributions

[Rava]

^
Indeed, I was slow on the uptake.

Works out of the box with midori-9.0-webkit2gtk-2.35.1-x86_64-1.xzm
Preview:

(click for FullHD resolution)

Image size comparison:

Code: Select all

guest@porteus:tmp$ du -k onworks.net.*
308	onworks.net.jpg
352	onworks.net.png
136	onworks.net.webp

PNG lossless, WebP and JPEG 93% (high quality)
Unless it's only GUI elements, when PNG has the smallest size, most of the other times WebP wins by smallest file size.

But sadly, abload.de doesn't support webp.

[Rava]

felt like testing onworks.net a bit more today, so i tried playing a youtube video and it works:

I choose Elementary OS as the host OS.
The restrictions of only having it for 3 minutes is still valid.
While I

* made the above screenshot
* edited the screenshot (resized it from FullHD to 1280x720 and from PNG to JPEG via mtPaint)
* Uploaded it to abload.de
* Beginning to write this post…

All that took me longer than the 3 minutes I get when using onworks.net, so the session is already closed.

[Kulle]

Hi Rava,
you can use onworks.net
and there you can choose a distribution, for example zorin OS

There is one more possibility:
use https://www.offidocs.com/
and use Chromium Online Web Browser there

[Rava]

There is one more possibility:
use https://www.offidocs.com/
and use Chromium Online Web Browser there

Does it have a time limit?
I realized that it is the first online browser thingy that allows to not only save locally to its server storage files downloaded by browsing, but in its filebrowser you can also download all these files to your own machine.

But there seems to be no way to get back to the Chromium browser since that is only on the main URL to be found, and not one of the many available programs.

Some screenshots:
Full Screen (resized) browser in its default zoom setting


Only the browser part for a better view:


And I also tried its GIMP

The red circle on the left was put there by me, since first I did not see the zoom buttons since with my palemoon dark settings these buttons are black on black.

All in all, a very nice experience. Thanks for the heads up.

Cave!
When you exit the browser e.g. to download files to your own machine there seems to be no way to get back to that very browser session.
In its filebrowser thingy there are a lot of programs listed you can choose from, but Chromium is not among these.

Added in 24 minutes 4 seconds:
I realized even after longer while the tab was still active during the time I edited and uploaded the screenshots and wrote the post.

And made a new screenshot that has all the icons of the available programs:


Added in 4 minutes 33 seconds:
(yes , there are at lest two audio editors: the well known audacity and the new to me sweep audio editor (that has two icons, weird enough). And then there is also "lmms music creator"

And there are two video editors as well: avidemux and openshot.

x

[Kulle]

Rava wrote
"but in its filebrowser you can also download all these files to your own machine."

And how do I have to do that?

[Rava]

^
Easy as pie my man.

HOWTO download stuff via OffiDocs

First - that should be obvious, open the Chromium browser and find stuff you want to save to the virtual machine folder.

In my example used the fedora logo of the initial page that got loaded when chromium is fired up.

1. right mouse click on the file as if you are in your real browser and in the context menu select save as...

I choose the default folder, that is: my given user-id on that virtual machine and /Downloads e.g. 123456/Downloads

2. Click File Manager (Top left)

A new tab opens in your real browser displaying the File Manager. I should have done that instead of another way I did the 1st time when I did fire up the File manager thus ending my browser session.

3. The new TAB should look similar to this:

navigate to Downloads


4. There are all your files, now just click the "Download" icon of the file you want to download:


Now a "Save As" Window opens in your real browser, unless you told it to do a certain thing with a certain file type without asking, then your real browser would do what you told him to do.
I set my Palemoon to always ask what to do and where to save file since I do not want downloads in the /home/ folder and thus the RAMdisk but somewhere on my hard disk or some external drive instead.

5. ????

6. Profit?

____________________________________________________________

Silly fun fact: As you can see in the file browser screenshot, it stated "This user has not password." instead of "This user has no password."

[Kulle]

Thanks Rava