[hobofan]

I'm a bit surprised that with all this, they still stuck with Chromium.

We have a much less sophisticated setup in our web-access MCP server[0] where browser instances are spawned as subprocesses and the biggest win in stability, CPU and memory usage we had was in switching from Chrome to Lightpanda[1].

Fitting to the statement at the end of the article, the faster browser to boot might be one that allocates less memory in general.

[0]: https://github.com/EratoLab/web-access-mcp

[1]: https://lightpanda.io

[Reformedot]

We decided to maintain Chromium as engine for stealth purposes.

Browsers like LightPanda lack stealth at all, they are trivial to detect. There are ways to make Chromium more performant, by removing everything that you don't need.

We believe that Chromium can reach that performance without starting an entire engine from scratch, and without losing stealth, a top priority for us.

The language is not the problem, C++ is as performant as Zig, but Chromium bloat is huge, agree on that.

[Natfan]

why are you making the internet worse for everyone with this "stealth" initiative? you are effectively lying to website operators.

[gck1]

I automate most things. Probably most of what I automate touches some proprietary system somewhere.

Why does web get a free pass?

[pocksuppet]

lying to website operators is allowed. Website operators aren't paragons of virtue, you know.

[Reformedot]

I get why it can look like we're “lying” to website operators, that’s a fair concern.

But stealth, as we see it, isn’t about deception for abuse. It’s about making automated access behave closer to how real users interact with the web, in an ecosystem where most anti-bot systems default to blocking everything that isn’t explicitly whitelisted.

Right now, the model is broken. Unless you have a direct partnership, you're often locked out, even for legitimate use cases like research, monitoring, or building user-facing tools on top of public data.

We’re not supporting harmful behavior (credential stuffing, DDoS, piracy, etc.). The goal is to enable responsible access to publicly available information without forcing every use case into closed-door agreements.

There’s also a real tradeoff happening. Increasingly aggressive anti-bot measures (like harder CAPTCHAs) degrade the experience for actual users, while not necessarily stopping sophisticated automation, robots solve CAPTCHAs better than humans.

So the question isn’t “bots vs no bots” — it’s what kinds of automated access should exist, and under what norms. Right now, that line is blurry, and we think there’s room for better balance.

Happy to engage on where that line should be drawn.

[shlewis]

> So the question isn’t “bots vs no bots” - it’s what kinds of automated access should exist, and under what norms.

I think it's pretty simple: if a website clearly isn't welcoming automated access, like when they set up UA filters and such, it should not be automatically. Stealth browsers that bypasses those filters are abusing the site.