Return of the Ingamebrowser?

[Hans-Joerg_Seiler]

I would love it to see the ingame browser returning, because I often watch streames while I do transportmissions and only have a single screen. I hope it will be possible to return this feature again.

[Do_Little]

Don’t hold your breath. Maintaining a state of the art browser requires the resources of a Google or Microsoft - let CCP devs focus on building their spaceship game. Small second hand monitors are offered in my local market as low as $25 so your single screen limitation is easily corrected!

[Paul_Torin]

The era of leaving EVE to play EVE is over

Note, that this is not a CCP software.

[you_are_evil]

wow…is it legal?

[Paul_Torin]

Eve Vision: play EVE without ever needing to leave EVE

Hey guys, I know this discussion has gotten a bit intense here over this tool. This is a general request to please just chill a bit, leave it be if you need to and please don’t abuse the flagging system. CCP is aware of this tool and I haven’t heard of any concerns regarding EULA violations at this time. To my understanding this is mostly just a web-browser overlay which isn’t considered an exploit. If other concerns arise we’ll let you know at that point. For now, please just chill out a bit …

[Rekindle]

first few iterations of igb was a chromium based browser…it was awesome but a massive security risk. THe return of the igb is about as plausible as PL and Goons actually fighting each other for real.

[Archer_en_Tilavine]

I could enumerate a very, very, very, very long list of reasons why IGB was a bad idea (not going to though), both from a UX and a technical POV, and not just because it drained CCP’s resources. If CCP a volunteer team of senior developers from Mozilla and Google maintaining the IGN so resources aren’t an issue, it would still be a bad idea. I am extremely impressed with the development of EVE Vision and give kudos to the developer for their accomplishment, but I am actively discouraging my crew from using it on the same (and additional) grounds that I had discouraged them from using IGB back when it was a thing. Alt-tabbing is not evil for those who don’t have multiple monitors (or even for those who do). Run the game in windowed mode, maximize it, and there’s no delay in switching windows. I have four monitors that are not fancy 4k, and I still alt-tab on the same monitor I play EVE in, and I’m not complaining about it. I have a low-end laptop with a screen that isn’t even 1080p that I alt-tab in and I’m not complaining about it. There are numerous disadvantages to using overlays that you will not have with “the real thing”. There were likewise numerous disadvantages to using a bootleg browser over “the real thing” (since CCP doesn’t have a volunteer team of senior devs from Mozilla and Google at their disposal). We don’t need IGB and we don’t need overlays.

[tutucox_Khamsi]

yes i miss in game browser
but ccp had a fair explanation for taking it out
so i doubts it will ever come back

[Nana_Skalski]

The issue with the overlays is they have to be used visely. For example EVE Vision someone posted link here. Whatever you do with it, still rules made by CCP apply to it.

There is only one thing u may not do with EVE Vision, what you also may not do with for example ISBoxer which is also legal to use but not everything done with it is legal, its to use it as a picture in picture technology for the other client UI on top of your main client screen. CCP sees tthat as gaining unfair advantage and they have tools that detect the clients actions so they will know you have used some tool the way you are not supposed to.

As for IGB, EVE Vision will not be your browser, its too restricted in functionalities every internet browser on market is defaultly shipped to market. Its more like a bookmark system for your internet EVE tools that work in window on top of EVE client screen. If you want browser, I think Opera is good enough, it even have pop out video window that you can place where you want that stays on top of the screen while you mine or do missions or wait for deployment.

[Shuckstar]

I seen a thread about it on Reddit where some CCP posted reply’s on the topic about it. They have no problems with it so far and I believe they are keeping a eye on it. I have been using it since it came out and it’s awesome.

[z0ra_Berg]

1. You can play in (borderless) windowed mode and have a browser on top of your client.
2. You can alt-tab out of full screen mode.
3. Gameplay, which allows people to do something else while playing, shouldn’t exist.

[Salt_Foambreaker]

Oh yes, lets bring back the ingame browser in 2020.

That way in addition to server attacks we can have clients using an inferior browser getting hacked,

Brilliant, just brilliant.

[Kyra_Lee]

I have been using eve vision for a few days now and I love it. The dev is constantly adding new things to the tool and listening to player feedback. I recommend people give it a shot and see how they like it.

[Jaydubs]

@Archer_en_Tilavine

I am extremely impressed with the development of EVE Vision and give kudos to the developer for their accomplishment, but I am actively discouraging my crew from using it on the same (and additional) grounds that I had discouraged them from using IGB back when it was a thing.

Thank you! I just wanted to say that security is my #1 concern in EveVision - not just in the sense of ‘websites can’t hack you’ but also feeling safe in installing my code on your computer.

Do you mind me asking what those grounds are, exactly, so I could perhaps improve on them?

Some notes on EveVision’s security:

1. EveVision is based on Electron. So long as I keep it up to date, it’s going to be just about as secure as using Chromium itself. It’s quite literally just Chromium processes that load an HTML page, rendering offscreen and sending the frame buffers to EVE. The browser itself is not actually inside of EVE, it is entirely sandboxed just like regular Chromium websites. Any website you visit inside EveVision is still entirely isolated from your operating system and EVE. There is very little code that actually runs inside of EVE. Discord, Slack, Streamlabs OBS, Visual Studio Code and Atom are all also based on Electron. Matter of fact, the techniques EveVision uses were recently made possible by contributions from the Discord team to the Electron repo.
2. Every single EXE is built publicly on GitHub using their CICD system. You can see everything going in and out, including the intermediate build artifacts which are uploaded. There’s no prebuilt binaries anywhere in the sourcecode. Here’s the build that produced 1.7.2. It’s not really possible for me to upload any malicious code or changes without someone noticing, which contrasts starkly to every web-based tool which cannot be proven in the same manner. Additionally, the build processes have been made dead simple. Anyone can build this and start hacking away after a few downloads and two commands.
3. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t believe the original ingame browser was actually based on Chromium. If I recall, it was simply using the WebKit rendering engine. This is an important distinction, since WebKit was not a sandbox like Chromium is. It was insecure by default and ran inside of EVE itself, whereas this is the most secure way possible. You don’t have to rely on a volunteer team, they already maintain this secure solution as an open source project.
4. I use Sentry.io for exception tracking, which has industry leading privacy protection systems in it that ensure no identifying information is accidentally transmitted. They’ve sponsored our project and given us all the top business-only features so I can use the best of the best data scrubbers, and even generate public URLs to issues to prove it. Here’s an example.
5. I’m working directly with multiple CCP employees to ensure that the software remains not only EULA compliant but also secure and healthy for the game. Their security-oriented developers are looking at the code too. You would be very surprised how much CCP cares about the security of their players. Matter of fact, after the very first public post of it on Reddit, CCP Bartender had sent me a 5-paragraph message on Reddit on how to do ESI better. Unfortunately, the code he was looking at was unused test code, but still.
6. Part of the goal for EveVision is allowing developers to make plugins inside of this sandboxed environment, so people can install these advanced tools from people without worry. Every EXE you’ve ever had to install could be done inside of EveVision, but made more secure than anything possible before. It would be distributed as simple javascript, like any other NPM package. You wouldn’t even give it your ESI directly, it would go through a proxy of sorts where you give it permissions just like an Android phone. I.e. if you go on a native EveEye explorer, it will ask ‘Do you want this plugin to have your location?’ rather than having you log into the ESI site. You could let a plugin watch your clipboard, but only for a certain pattern. It could read files, but only the ones CCP said were EULA legal.

If there’s anything you think I could do to improve it or make you feel better about your crew using it, please let me know! I want to make sure every EVE player can use this and feel safe while using it, too. Otherwise it’s unfair - you shouldn’t have to install software you feel is unsafe to keep up in a game. I predict there will be corporations and such that require people to use this once they made EveVision-based plugins, and that won’t be very good if it’s not considered very secure.

[Jaydubs]

@Nana_Skalski

As for IGB, EVE Vision will not be your browser, its too restricted in functionalities every internet browser on market is defaultly shipped to market. Its more like a bookmark system for your internet EVE tools that work in window on top of EVE client screen. If you want browser, I think Opera is good enough, it even have pop out video window that you can place where you want that stays on top of the screen while you mine or do missions or wait for deployment.

I’d like to point out that this is simply just because I haven’t had the time to make it yet. I’ve developed the entirety of EveVision in about a month and a half. There will be a full-blown browser soon, but note it isn’t the goal of EveVision, it would just be another plugin. Anybody could implement that if they wanted.

That being said, you are more than welcome to use whatever you feel is best for the job! Opera will definitely give you the full browser UX better than I will. It just won’t feel like it’s part of EVE.

[Archer_en_Tilavine]

Security is a potential security to be sure, but my primary concerns actually lie with the concept of overlays in general, especially in a game like EVE specifically. I have a problem with the actual use case. I have a problem with the inherent issues overlays have that no implementation can solve. I also have a problem with an EVE overlay attempting to solve, with numerous drawbacks, what I consider to be a non-existent problem. I’ve educated several people about how EVE actually has a windowed mode that you can use and maximize for a full screen experience, and how once you use it you have no lag switching between applications or overlaying actual applications on top of EVE - they’ve been 100% content with this. I also want to compare and contrast with another overlay experience: my crew relies on Discord heavily, which has an overlay for EVE and other games… we hate it, not because the overlay sucks, but because overlays in general by their nature have severe drawbacks that we’d rather alt+tab and/or use multiple monitors than deal with the drawbacks. We don’t use it because we’d rather deal with the native app via alt+tab/multiple monitor than the overlay.

(Interestingly enough, if your use an OS with a window manager and your window manager supports window transparency, this would be a better way of providing transparent overlays - by the window manager rather than implemented in the game itself)

So really, however good your overlay implementation turns out to be in regards to security or UI/UX or interoperability, the inherent drawbacks of overlays is why I discourage our members from using them in favor of running EVE in windowed mode and alt+tabbing/multi-monitor for use with other windows.

My position on overlays aside, you should be very proud of yourself for this impressive piece of software you’ve written. Very nice resume piece.

[Jaydubs]

Ah. Fair enough! I don’t try to convince people on the virtues of overlays. It absolutely is just as easy to use your methods and we’ve been doing that for some time now without issue.

I added it a bit late to my post - but there are more goals to EveVision than just providing an overlay. It’s also meant to be a platform for building secure, sandboxed tools. Things like the DPS graph or Pyfa could be packaged as simple javascript and would be just as trustable as EveVision or any web-based tool by default due to the sandbox. I also hope that it will encourage more devs to make EVE tools, since it’s just basic HTML, CSS, and TypeScript. Anyone that can make websites can now make beautiful EVE tools. This is what I’m really excited for, honestly.

Perhaps something I’m working on may interest you then - a native window mode where it’s just normal, albeit frameless Chromium windows, like most Electron apps (like Discord!). There’s actually going to be a mode for doing just that anyways for developers, so they don’t have to open EVE to test their tool. I didn’t really consider that perhaps some people don’t like overlays in general. I may dedicate more of my time towards this now.

I personally do not see the downside of overlays vs an always-on-top window, but EveVision is not meant to solely be a direct-render injected overlay. That’s simply where I started.

And thanks again. Of all my personal projects this is definitely the one I’m most proud of.