About this project

Obscura is an open-source headless browser engine written in Rust, aimed at web scraping and AI agent automation. Rather than wrapping Chromium, it implements its own rendering engine and runs real JavaScript through an embedded V8, exposing the Chrome DevTools Protocol so existing Puppeteer and Playwright scripts can connect to it. Key capabilities described in the README: - Rendering without Chromium: CSS layout and paint, viewport and full-page screenshots, scroll-aware fixed/sticky geometry, CDP screencasting, and raster PDF export. The README notes it is an evolving independent engine, so long-tail CSS, some Web APIs, media playback, compositor effects, and platform font rasterization may differ from Chromium. - CDP compatibility: Target, Page, Runtime, DOM, Network, Fetch, IO, Storage, Input domains, plus a DOM-to-Markdown helper. Puppeteer connects via browserWSEndpoint and Playwright via connectOverCDP. - CLI workflows: `fetch` for single pages (dump html/text/links/markdown/assets/original, JS eval, wait conditions, screenshots, output files), `scrape` for parallel multi-URL scraping with concurrency and JSON/text output, and `serve` to start a CDP WebSocket server. - Stealth mode: per-session fingerprint randomization (GPU, screen, canvas, audio, battery), realistic userAgentData, isTrusted events, native function masking, webdriver undefined, and blocking of a large tracker domain list. - MCP server: exposes browser automation tools to AI agents such as Claude Desktop and Cursor over stdio or HTTP. - Deployment: prebuilt binaries for Linux x86_64/ARM64, macOS Intel/Apple Silicon, Windows, NixOS, plus a distroless Docker image. Build variants toggle rendering and stealth; the stealth build compiles BoringSSL and needs CMake/Clang/libclang. - Operational controls: HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy support, robots.txt option, SSRF protection with an explicit private-network override, V8 flag passthrough, and configurable script/module timeouts and network body buffer limits. The README also lists benchmark comparisons against headless Chrome and mentions a hosted Obscura Cloud offering, while stating the open-source engine remains Apache-2.0 and fully featured. Sponsorship sections mention proxy providers.