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by monkmartinez 509 days ago
This is pretty neat, but I have to ask; Why does everyone want to build and/or use a headless browser?

When I use pyautogui and my desktop chrome app I never have problems with captchas or trigger bot detectors. When I use a "headless" playwright, selenium, or puppeteer, I almost always run into problems. My conclusion is that "headless" scrapping creates more problems than it solves. Why don't we use the chrome, firefox, safari, or edge that we are using on a day to day basis?

1 comments

I guess it depends on the scale of your requests.

When you want to browse a few websites from time to time, a local headful browser might be a solution. But when you have thousands or millions of webpages, you need a server environment and a headless browser.

In the past I've run hundreds of headful instances of Chrome in a server environment using Xvfb. It was not a pleasant experience :)