Whoah there! Don't confuse "in the browser" with "in Internet Explorer."

2012 was the first year that Chrome was successfully exploited and Firefox has done fairly well every year. At the 2013 event the Chrome exploit only worked in Windows!

Oh that's unaccelerated, man! For whatever reason my laptop's Intel video doesn't get 2d accelerated canvas (probably a driver bug). On my wife'x iMac the CPU utilization hovers around 10% playing the same video.

Just wait until I get it working with a 3d WebGL context. Then it will be using hardly any CPU at all!

Gate One's X11 app already supports sharing of individual windows or whole desktops. I haven't implemented a GUI for it yet but that's just one of many TODO items I'm working through before the beta.

Actually the demo uses smplayer.

But whatever, details. Who cares, right? ;D

You'll love Gate One's X11 app then. With WebP encoding the bandwidth utilization playing back that Big Buck Bunny video hovers around ~700kbits/sec. With the default JPEG encoding it hovers around 1Mbits/sec (that's what you see in the Youtube video).

Even full-screen video playback never goes above 1.5Mbits/sec in my testing. That's with a 1366x768 display. Testing with JPEG encoding has it averaging out around 1.2Mbits/sec most of the time with peaks at 1.5MBits/sec here and there.

That's exactly how Gate One's X11 app works. Well, it can't buffer video in any significant way without adding non-trivial delays to interactivity but it does keep independent caches for each window on the screen and each gets their own encoding/quality strategy based on how often updates occur (bandwidth utilization isn't taken into account yet).

So that terminal running in the background will have nice and crisp, PNG-rendered text while the video playing in the forground will utilize JPEG (or WebP) encoding to reduce bandwidth (and CPU consumption on the server). If you look closely you can see this in the video.

Real-time encoding of desktop apps using h.264 is a bad idea. Text will look awful.

Gate One defaults to PNG encoding of screen/window/region captures and switches automatically to JPEG if updates start happening fast enough (because JPEG is much less CPU overhead than PNG). Its a threshold thing.

The quality can be adjusted on-the-fly as well. WebP support is there too but I'm torn as to whether to use it by default or not (if the browser supports it) because the CPU utilization is on par with PNG yet it is lossy (lossless works too but is too slow to encode to be realistic). The only benefit with WebP is reduced bandwidth... Admittedly it is a non-trivial amount (probably about half as much as JPEG at equivalent quality levels).

Once the beta is out I'll probably have more data to make a better decision about WebP.

How many submissions have you made? I didn't pay anything to get this posted. I just typed it up into the submission form earlier today and about an hour and a half later it appeared on the front page. I've done that 5 times now (not just for Gate One) with 6 attempts (I ended up having to re-submit something once =). So an accept/submit ratio of 5/6--not bad.

I personally think xpra is awesome. When searching for examples of XCB use in Python it came up in a number of results. My only issue with it is that it requires a client be installed.

Clients have to be deployed to every desktop and you have to re-deploy every time there's an update. I've been in IT long enough that I am absolutely sick of that. Web apps are the way to go. Deploy once to the web server(s) and you're done. No need to push out updates to clients.

You know, if Wayland has Python bindings and an API akin to XCB (or Xlib) I can make it work with that too. Wouldn't even take much effort!

Great: So now the computer manufacturers are going to point the finger to ME and say, "You're the reason why millenials aren't buying computers anymore!"

I really like the idea of using a fresnel lens over a smartphone to turn it into a larger desktop! I'm going to try that (I happen to have a big collection of fresnel lenses--don't ask =).

I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure your use case works because I want to be able to do that too! I also want to be able to pick up where I left off if I have to work on something while I'm out & about. Just whip out my Chromebook and I'm coding using the desktop (or just the app) I left behind.

So yeah, I just gave away an interesting feature: If you're using a Linux desktop (like I do) and you fire up Gate One it can connect to the existing X11 display and forward just the app you want it to. It doesn't have to be the entire desktop.

Reading your comment makes me think you'll love Gate One's ability to resume your session--even after restarting the process. I'll give you a hypothetical example:

1) I connect to https://gateone.mycompany.com/ and open up LibreOffice Calc.
2) I connect to the server running Gate One via SSH and run "/etc/init.d/gateone stop"
3) The web page reports it has been disconnected but it will retry connecting every five seconds.
4) I run "/etc/init.d/gateone start"
5) The web page reconnects to the Gate One server and my spreadsheet is back in front of me--right where i left it.

That works with terminals too if you install the dtach command. Everything will resume right where you left off even after killing and restarting the gateone.py process. This makes upgrading Gate One about as easy as can be; users will experience ~5 seconds of down time while the upgrade takes place and the process is restarted.

Because it's not a video player. It's a remote desktop/X11 tool. The video is merely an acid test demonstrating how fast/efficient it is. If it is fast enough to play back a video surely it's fast enough to use a spreadsheet or a text editor, right?

That won't work so well since this doesn't currently support audio. It's in the TODO list though :)

Also, if you're playing back a video you're much better off just playing it directly in the browser. You can even re-encode videos in real-time to be played back with whatever codecs Chromecast supports (if necessary).

I don't know about that. When I think to myself, "What has an imperial fucktonne of exploits?" here's what comes to mind:

* Windows (and Microsoft software in general)
* Java (and especially the use of Java inside browsers)
* Flash
* PDFs
* Loads of other proprietary software/solutions

Exploiting the browser these days is very difficult and browser vendors are doing a really good job with competitions/incentives to uncover vulnerabilities before they become a problem. Using the browser has the distinct advantage of *not* having the same problems of the proprietary products I enumerated above. You get whole new ones! But at least they're manageable and (mostly) predictable.

The more apps that are available in browsers the better. They're as cross-platform as you can get right now and if you host them yourself you can avoid the spying problem.