Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

At a previous job in the not-too-distant past, we needed to support IE7 for contractual reasons. I'd unironically floated the idea of launching a VM on the server running Firefox, and starting a VNC session, streamed over frames of a GIF. Clicks and keypresses would be transmitted with AJAX calls.

In a later project, we played with the idea of using an asm.js-compiled Webkit to render SVG (with embedded HTML) into a canvas due to mixed browser support.

Long story short, it's not inconceivable.

Write once, run everywhere promise of the web delivered like never before.

There was a Chinese mobile browser that essentially did this if I recall. And didn't Amazon have something like this for one of their earlier Kindles?

This is pretty crazy. I love it.

Doesn't citrix solve this problem?

Facebook should try to adapt screamer-prank tech[0] for ads. Even if an ad missed your attention, you'd still have to pay 1 laundry bill and 1 bill for stuttering-aid couching.

Jokes aside, even with rendering to canvas, ad can be blocked with image recognition. Long time ago I used Sikuli Script for UI testing automation, Sikuli recognized parts of screen and worked very fast; combine it with an app like CinemaDrape and voila.

[0] (loud noises warning) https://youtu.be/469zNXTCHdk?t=10

Sounds a bit like Apache Guacamole, which is sometimes used for presenting old software to users via a web setup.

I worked on a project a few years ago to render screenshots to imagemaps, then used server side imagemap processing to click.

Made modern websites work in Netscape 2 :)