🔥 Ablaze

A simple search engine + website proxy so that you can browse the modern web on browsers from the late 20th century.

Warning

Turn of JavaScript in your browser or else you may get JS errors due to the Cloudflare challenge script.

Website Links:

• http://dih.pythonanywhere.com/ (HTTP/HTTPS, slowest)
• https://ablaze-cyan.vercel.app/ (only HTTPS and modern TLS/SSL, may not work on old browsers, fastest)
• https://ablaze.anw.is-a.dev/ (same as above, but custom domain, coming soon, fastest)

It uses the Python DDGS module for getting search results (aggregated) and a custom-made page stripper based proxy service so that you can freely browse the current, modern Internet on super old browsers. It also comes with a lite mode (to use, visit the /lite route!) for even more compatibility. It has both HTTP and HTTPS support, thanks to Vercel!

Ablaze stores your cookies on Upstash for a maximum duration of 1 hour after inactivity to keep you logged into sites using the proxy.

✅ Tested On:

• (Oracle VirtualBox VM) Windows XP Pro SP3 64bit /w K-Meleon 76.4 - OK
• (DOSBox-X VM) Windows 98 SE /w MS IE 5.0 - OK
• Windows 10 Pro 22H2 64bit /w Perplexity Comet, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox - OK
• Android 8.1 /w Google Chrome - OK
• MrrpOS GNU/Linux /w linux 6.13.2 /w Lynx 2.9.2 - OK
• (DOSBox-X VM) Windows 98 SE /w Netscape Navigator 3.0 (JS off) - PARTIAL (UI issues and CF challenge JS)

⚙ Backend on dih.pythonanywhere.com

anw.is-a.dev is whitelisted on PythonAnywhere. By using my domain, I created a 3-step proxy for Ablaze's website. Why? Because PythonAnywhere is the only reliable host which allows HTTP while Vercel forces HTTPS, which most retro browsers don't support. Here's the source code:

from flask import Flask, request, Response
from urllib.parse import quote
import requests

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/', defaults={'path': ''}, methods=["GET", "POST"])
@app.route('/<path:path>', methods=["GET", "POST"])
def relay(path):
    if path.startswith("api/ablaze/"):
        path = path.replace("api/ablaze/", "", 1)
    elif path == "api/ablaze":
        path = ""

    path = quote(path, safe="")

    target_url = (
        f"https://anw.is-a.dev/api/ablaze/{path}"
        if path else
        "https://anw.is-a.dev/api/ablaze"
    )

    try:
        headers = {
            k: v
            for k, v in request.headers.items()
            if k.lower() not in (
                "host",
                "user-agent",
                "content-length",
                "connection"
            )
        }

        headers["User-Agent"] = (
            "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) "
            "AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) "
            "Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
        )

        resp = requests.request(
            method=request.method,
            url=target_url,
            params=request.args,
            data=request.get_data(),
            headers=headers,
            allow_redirects=False,
            timeout=30
        )

        excluded_headers = {
            "host",
            "content-encoding",
            "content-length",
            "transfer-encoding",
            "connection",
        }

        response_headers = {
            k: v
            for k, v in resp.headers.items()
            if k.lower() not in excluded_headers
        }

        return Response(
            resp.content,
            status=resp.status_code,
            headers=response_headers
        )

    except Exception as e:
        return f"Relay error: {e}", 500

Please do not use my API for production.

⚙ Backend on anw.is-a.dev/api/ablaze

This is the source code for the Flask endpoint at anw.is-a.dev/api/ablaze. Please host it yourself and do not use my API for production. I do NOT guarantee 100% uptime. Why not just host Ablaze on anw.is-a.dev? Because I don't want to. Ofcourse, you don't need this if you are hosting it by yourself.

@app.route('/api/ablaze', defaults={'url_path': ''}, methods=["GET", "POST", "PUT", "PATCH", "DELETE", "HEAD", "OPTIONS"])
@app.route('/api/ablaze/<path:url_path>', methods=["GET", "POST", "PUT", "PATCH", "DELETE", "HEAD", "OPTIONS"])
def ablaze_backend_proxy(url_path):
    url_path = unquote(url_path)
    
    if url_path.startswith("api/ablaze/"):
        url_path = url_path.replace("api/ablaze/", "", 1)
    elif url_path == "api/ablaze":
        url_path = ""

    if "proxy/https:/" in url_path and "proxy/https://" not in url_path:
        url_path = url_path.replace("proxy/https:/", "proxy/https://", 1)
    elif "proxy/http:/" in url_path and "proxy/http://" not in url_path:
        url_path = url_path.replace("proxy/http:/", "proxy/http://", 1)
        
    if "pure-proxy/https:/" in url_path and "pure-proxy/https://" not in url_path:
        url_path = url_path.replace("pure-proxy/https:/", "pure-proxy/https://", 1)
    elif "pure-proxy/http:/" in url_path and "pure-proxy/http://" not in url_path:
        url_path = url_path.replace("pure-proxy/http:/", "pure-proxy/http://", 1)

    if url_path.startswith("proxy/"):
        url_path = "proxy/" + quote(unquote(url_path[6:]), safe="")
    elif url_path.startswith("pure-proxy/"):
        url_path = "pure-proxy/" + quote(unquote(url_path[11:]), safe="")

    target_url = f"https://ablaze-cyan.vercel.app/{url_path}"
    headers = { k: v for k, v in request.headers.items() if k.lower() not in ["host", "accept-encoding"] }
    
    try:
        response = requests.request(
            method=request.method,
            url=target_url,
            params=request.args,
            data=request.get_data(),
            cookies=request.cookies,
            headers=headers,
            allow_redirects=False,
            timeout=60
        )
        
        proxy_resp = Response(response.content, status=response.status_code)
        
        excluded_headers = ['content-encoding', 'transfer-encoding', 'content-length', 'content-range']
        for k, v in response.headers.items():
            if k.lower() not in excluded_headers:
                proxy_resp.headers[k] = v
                
        return proxy_resp
        
    except Exception as e:
        return f"Ablaze API Gateway Error: {e}", 500

🤝 Contributors:

None at the moment, but you can become one! Talk to ANW or make a PR to contribute.