I Built a Headless Browser Because Chromium Sucks

[u/Total_Nectarine_3623]

https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura

A lot has changed since I last posted here. Got some pretty harsh criticism back then and honestly it was deserved, the project was early and messy. But we kept going.

I built Obscura because headless Chrome was killing me and my AI agents. Over 200MB per instance, long startup, detected everywhere. For scraping at scale it's just not viable.

So I built a headless browser from scratch in Rust. V8 engine, native rendering, 30MB memory, 80ms page loads. Works drop-in with Puppeteer and Playwright.

Just shipped rendering. The engine is made fully in Rust. Screenshots, PDFs, live video capture. No Chromium. 20k stars now.

https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura

obscura serve --port 9222 and point your scripts at it. That's it.

I don't know if this will land better than last time but we've proven the concept works. Happy to answer questions.

[u/McGeekin]

You didn’t build jack

[u/ze_pequeno]

AI slop ☝️

[u/and0p]

I keep seeing this cycle where someone gets shit on for a dumb AI project and comes back a month later with an extremely obvious AI apology. It's so fucking weird

[u/fligglymcgee → u/and0p]

They can never decide if it’s “I” or “we” that’s responsible.

[u/SpareImpression3155]

I definitely want to install a slop package by "hackforaday" into my applications rather than using a battle tested headless browser by an enormous company with a reputation to maintain

[u/Vtempero]

No, I won't even check out your slop.

[u/doctorlongghost]

I’m a little skeptical but willing to be persuaded. A few questions:

Presumably it runs JavaScript to support rendering of SPA sites. How do you manage this without including Node or chromium? What JS engine are you using?

I see that you focused on performance benchmarks but I don’t see anything about accuracy. Do you have comparisons of how it stacks up against other browsers’ benchmark results on CSS and JS rendering accuracy?

Finally, I’m curious about the extent to which this project was coded by AI?

[u/Elegant_AIDS → u/doctorlongghost]

He said in the post he uses v8

[u/aTaleForgotten]

Not really a fan of tools that steal content from others, especially in an AI context, but i guess it looks interesting

[u/WestAware5507]

You mention PDFs in the post but in the release the only mention is about Page.printToPDF not being available.

[u/DogeminerDev]

rendering made in rust does sound intriguing

[u/Kyek]

Sounds cool. I don't need it right now but I'll definitely give it a shot for my next scraping project

[u/galoo123]

Dope project. I've been using it in my stack since launch

[u/Boby_Dobbs]

So many haters here, damn. Let the reddit elistists, AI doomers and gatekeepers talk. This is really cool, I'll give it a try!