Development · GitHub repo
Obscura
Lightweight Rust headless browser for AI agents and web scraping
Obscura is an open-source headless browser engine written in Rust, purpose-built for web scraping and AI agent automation. It embeds Google's V8 engine to execute real JavaScript, supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), and acts as a drop-in replacement for headless Chrome in Puppeteer and Playwright setups. It starts instantly and uses a fraction of the memory (around 30MB) while including built-in anti-detection and tracker blocking.
What it's for
- Run automated web scraping pipelines with minimal memory and disk footprints
- Power AI agent web browsing workflows through the native Model Context Protocol (MCP) server
- Bypass basic bot detection and fingerprinting during automated browser tasks
- Replace resource-heavy headless Chrome instances in Puppeteer and Playwright scripts
- Capture full-page screenshots, render live screencasts, and export PDFs without running Chromium
Features
- Drop-in CDP server compatible with Puppeteer and Playwright workflows
- Embedded V8 engine for executing real JavaScript and handling complex SPAs
- Built-in stealth anti-detection masking navigator.webdriver, hardware properties, and canvas fingerprints
- Integrated ad and tracker blocking across over 3,500 domains
- Native page rendering covering CSS layouts, screenshots, and PDF exports without Chromium
- Built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for integration with Claude Desktop and Cursor
- Self-contained single binary with zero external dependencies, available for Linux, macOS, and Windows
- Parallel scraping CLI supporting concurrent worker processes, proxies, and structured JSON output
Pricing
Open source. Free and open-source (Apache-2.0); hosted Obscura Cloud waitlist available.
Details
- Type
- GitHub repo
- Category
- Development
- Topic
- Web Scraping
- Open source
- Yes
- Platforms
- Linux, macOS, Windows, Command line
- For
- Developers, web scrapers, and AI engineers needing high-efficiency, stealthy browser automation.
- Alternative to
- Headless Chrome, Puppeteer, Playwright
- Tags
- headless browser, web scraping, rust, puppeteer, playwright, mcp, ai agents
Why it was saved
- @ChrisLaubAI: Far lighter and faster than headless Chrome (30MB memory vs 200+MB, 70MB binary vs 300+MB, 85ms page load vs ~500ms, instant startup vs ~2s), with built-in anti-detect: per-session fingerprint randomization (GPU, canvas, audio, battery), 3,520 tracker domains blocked by default, navigator.webdriver masked to match real Chrome, and native function masking against detectors.
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