Obscura

The open-source headless browser for AI agents and web scraping.
Lightweight, stealthy, and built in Rust.

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Obscura is a headless browser engine written in Rust, built for web scraping and AI agent automation. It runs real JavaScript via V8, supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and acts as a drop-in replacement for headless Chrome with Puppeteer and Playwright.

Why Obscura over headless Chrome?

Designed for automation at scale, not desktop browsing.

Metric	Obscura	Headless Chrome
Memory	30 MB	200+ MB
Binary size	70 MB	300+ MB
Anti-detect	Built-in	None
Page load	85 ms	~500 ms
Startup	Instant	~2s
Puppeteer	Yes	Yes
Playwright	Yes	Yes

🎉 10,000 stars and what's next

I'm working on Obscura Cloud the hosted version, with managed infrastructure, residential proxies, and dedicated support. For people who want the engine without operating it themselves.

The open-source engine stays Apache-2.0, fully featured. No feature gating, ever.

Get on the waitlist →

Install

Download

Grab the latest binary from Releases:

# Linux x86_64
curl -LO https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura/releases/latest/download/obscura-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
tar xzf obscura-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
./obscura fetch https://example.com --eval "document.title"

# macOS Apple Silicon
curl -LO https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura/releases/latest/download/obscura-aarch64-macos.tar.gz
tar xzf obscura-aarch64-macos.tar.gz

# macOS Intel
curl -LO https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura/releases/latest/download/obscura-x86_64-macos.tar.gz
tar xzf obscura-x86_64-macos.tar.gz

# Windows
Download the `.zip` from the releases page and extract it manually.

No Chrome, no Node.js, no dependencies. Release archives include both obscura and obscura-worker; keep them in the same directory for the parallel scrape command.

Linux release builds target Ubuntu 22.04 so the downloaded binary remains usable on common LTS servers with glibc 2.35+.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura.git
cd obscura
cargo build --release

# With stealth mode (anti-detection + tracker blocking)
cargo build --release --features stealth

Requires Rust 1.75+ (rustup.rs). First build takes ~5 min (V8 compiles from source, cached after).

Quick Start

Fetch a page

# Get the page title
obscura fetch https://example.com --eval "document.title"

# Extract all links
obscura fetch https://example.com --dump links

# Render JavaScript and dump HTML
obscura fetch https://news.ycombinator.com --dump html

# Write dump or eval output to a file
obscura fetch https://example.com --dump text --output page.txt

# Wait for dynamic content
obscura fetch https://example.com --wait-until networkidle0

# Bound navigation time for slow or broken pages
obscura fetch https://example.com --timeout 10

Start the CDP server

obscura serve --port 9222

# With stealth mode (anti-detection + tracker blocking)
obscura serve --port 9222 --stealth

Scrape in parallel

obscura scrape url1 url2 url3 ... \
  --concurrency 25 \
  --eval "document.querySelector('h1').textContent" \
  --format json

# Suppress scrape progress on stderr for script-friendly output
obscura scrape https://example.com --quiet --format json

Puppeteer / Playwright

Puppeteer

npm install puppeteer-core

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';

const browser = await puppeteer.connect({
  browserWSEndpoint: 'ws://127.0.0.1:9222/devtools/browser',
});

const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://news.ycombinator.com');

const stories = await page.evaluate(() =>
  Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.titleline > a'))
    .map(a => ({ title: a.textContent, url: a.href }))
);
console.log(stories);

await browser.disconnect();

Playwright

npm install playwright-core

import { chromium } from 'playwright-core';

const browser = await chromium.connectOverCDP({
  endpointURL: 'ws://127.0.0.1:9222',
});

const page = await browser.newContext().then(ctx => ctx.newPage());
await page.goto('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping');
console.log(await page.title());

await browser.close();

Form submission & login

await page.goto('https://quotes.toscrape.com/login');
await page.evaluate(() => {
  document.querySelector('#username').value = 'admin';
  document.querySelector('#password').value = 'admin';
  document.querySelector('form').submit();
});
// Obscura handles the POST, follows the 302 redirect, maintains cookies

Benchmarks

Page load:

Page	Obscura	Chrome
Static HTML	51 ms	~500 ms
JS + XHR + fetch	84 ms	~800 ms
Dynamic scripts	78 ms	~700 ms

Stealth Mode

Enable with --features stealth.

Anti-fingerprinting

• Per-session fingerprint randomization (GPU, screen, canvas, audio, battery)
• Realistic navigator.userAgentData (Chrome 145, high-entropy values)
• event.isTrusted = true for dispatched events
• Hidden internal properties (Object.keys(window) safe)
• Native function masking (Function.prototype.toString() → [native code])
• navigator.webdriver = undefined (matches real Chrome)

Tracker Blocking

• 3,520 domains blocked
• Blocks analytics, ads, telemetry, and fingerprinting scripts
• Prevents trackers from loading entirely
• Enabled automatically with --stealth

CDP API

Obscura implements the Chrome DevTools Protocol for Puppeteer/Playwright compatibility.

Domain	Methods
Target	createTarget, closeTarget, attachToTarget, createBrowserContext, disposeBrowserContext
Page	navigate, getFrameTree, addScriptToEvaluateOnNewDocument, lifecycleEvents
Runtime	evaluate, callFunctionOn, getProperties, addBinding
DOM	getDocument, querySelector, querySelectorAll, getOuterHTML, resolveNode
Network	enable, setCookies, getCookies, setExtraHTTPHeaders, setUserAgentOverride
Fetch	enable, continueRequest, fulfillRequest, failRequest (live interception)
Storage	getCookies, setCookies, deleteCookies
Input	dispatchMouseEvent, dispatchKeyEvent
LP	getMarkdown (DOM-to-Markdown conversion)

CLI Reference

obscura serve

Start a CDP WebSocket server.

Flag	Default	Description
--port	9222	WebSocket port
--proxy	—	HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy URL
--stealth	off	Enable anti-detection + tracker blocking
--workers	1	Number of parallel worker processes
--obey-robots	off	Respect robots.txt

obscura fetch <URL>

Fetch and render a single page.

Flag	Default	Description
--dump	html	Output: html, text, or links
--eval	—	JavaScript expression to evaluate
--wait-until	load	Wait: load, domcontentloaded, networkidle0
--timeout	30	Maximum navigation time in seconds
--selector	—	Wait for CSS selector
--stealth	off	Anti-detection mode
--output	—	Write dump or eval output to a file
--quiet	off	Suppress banner

obscura scrape <URL...>

Scrape multiple URLs in parallel with worker processes.

Flag	Default	Description
--concurrency	10	Parallel workers
--eval	—	JS expression per page
--format	json	Output: json or text
--quiet	off	Suppress scrape progress on stderr

License

Apache 2.0

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