What did this browser actually cost? 💀 Honestly, if I had to put a price tag on this project, I'd say $400+ but probably if we count all the free resets 1000+ easily, and even that number is sketchy as hell. This took roughly 2-3 weeks of work, and that's not counting the fact that I've also been working on a native BioShock Infinite port for the Quest 3, which can eat up 50% or more of my Claude usage by itself. For context, I'm running two paid plans: a $200 Claude plan and a $100 Codex plan. That's $300 a month in subscriptions alone, before even getting into the time, experimentation, troubleshooting, and everything else that went into making this thing work. Codex came in clutch, especially with Tibo giving me around six free usage resets across this week and last week alone. I know I've gotten at least seven free Codex weekly usage resets over the last 28 days. I should've gotten another one today, too. And then there's Astra. 💀 Opus 5.5 is lightning fast genius will be like this is gonna take 4 months and do it and a day , but Astra has a special talent for acting like a depressed, unmotivated swine who gives up if a gust of wind blows within a 1,000-meter radius. Instead of trying to work around an obstacle, it'll stop and ask me how to proceed at the slightest inconvenience. So what did I start doing? I let Opus tell Astra what the hell to do. And honestly, that has helped. The browser itself has YouTube-DL/yt-dlp, jdownloader, uBlock Origin, and a ridiculous amount of custom functionality. My controller has all kinds of shortcuts, including ways to save websites for downloading when I find useful sources. I went all out with this thing. It wasn't just a matter of installing existing tools, either. A lot of the work involved creating functionality that didn't exist, figuring out how to implement it, and then integrating things that already existed into a cohesive experience. That's where the cost gets difficult to quantify. You're not just paying for code. You're paying for the process of figuring out what can be done, making it work, fixing what breaks, and repeatedly pushing past limitations that weren't supposed to be there in the first place. The GPU problem is a whole different beast. Unless you're using Shadowmount or a similar remote GPU setup, getting proper access to GPU acceleration in this environment is incredibly difficult. Not impossible, as I've found ways around some of those restrictions, but the solutions can be unconventional enough to make Claude freak the fuck out(cyber threat...stfu claude). And that's one of the biggest limitations of working without a GPU: it affects practically everything that depends on acceleration. Performance optimization, graphics-heavy workloads, rendering, hardware-accelerated video processing, and a bunch of other things become significantly harder to implement, test, or verify. You can work around a lot of limitations, but you can't pretend those limitations don't exist. Without proper GPU access, some things are simply harder to achieve consistently, and getting something to work once doesn't automatically mean you can guarantee perfect performance in every situation. Which makes the results even more ridiculous. I've pushed this setup up to 4K, 60 FPS, with HDR and no drops, without a dedicated GPU. Let that sink in. I basically had to fight just to get 10 FPS at 720p when I started pushing into some of this stuff. Going from that to what I've managed to achieve is insane. And no, that doesn't mean every workload or every scenario performs like that. My numbers are still a little sketchy, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But the fact that I've gotten this far under these constraints is something I'm genuinely proud of. I've been pushing the same philosophy into my other projects, too. The native BioShock Infinite Quest 3 port, the Xbox 360 dashboard recreation, and the rest of my work are all about recreating that original experience while keeping the feel, functionality, and overall identity intact. I'm not interested in making something that vaguely resembles the original. I want it to feel right. And a big part of why I care so much about this stuff comes down to the games I grew up loving. Bayonetta. Borderlands.Bioshock infinite That entire era of games. I fucking love that era. The creativity, the personality, the presentation, the menus, the music, the atmosphere, the way everything had its own identity. Those games had character. They weren't just products designed to keep you engaged for another five minutes. They had a distinct feel, and you could recognize them instantly. That's the kind of experience I want to preserve and recreate in my projects. Whether it's a browser, an old dashboard port, or bringing a game like BioShock Infinite to a standalone VR headset, I want to keep that original character alive while pushing the hardware and software as far as I possibly can. And doing all of this while fighting limited GPU access, inconsistent AI agents, usage caps, and the frequent digital breakdown from Astra makes it that much more satisfying. So, yeah, the $400+ estimate might be conservative when you factor in subscriptions, development time, experimentation, and all the work that went into making things that weren't readily available in the first place. The exact number is hard to pin down, but the amount of effort is very real. This will probably be my last post about this browser project. Functionally, it's complete. The core experience is there, the tools are integrated, the shortcuts are in place, and I've pushed it a hell of a lot further than I initially expected to. Everything from here is pretty much victory laps. 🏁 And honestly? After everything it took to get here, I think I've earned those. I wonder in the future how high the ceiling would be theoretical like 12k i know 8k is possible easily if i can do 4k no gpu when does the actual hardware become the problem   submitted by   /u/warframeendurance [link]   [comments]