Obscura

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

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

We are 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 →
📅 Book a demo →

Sponsors

Obscura is supported by sponsors who help keep development independent.

Want to sponsor? Email hello@obscura.sh.

	🚀 Obscura × SX.org Using Obscura for AI agents, browser automation, or web scraping? Power your workflow with stable proxies from SX.org. 🌍 12M+ IPs across 235 countries 🏠 7M+ residential IPs 📱 4M+ mobile IPs 🏢 1M+ corporate proxies 🔁 Rotating & sticky sessions 📍 Flexible geo setup 🌐 HTTP, HTTPS & SOCKS5 support ⚡ Up to 99.97% connection success 🛟 24/7 support 🎁 Use code Obscura3gb to get a free 3GB trial. Stable proxies. Fewer blocks. Most reliable Obscura automation.
	Swiftproxy — Premium residential proxies built for privacy, automation, and scale. 80M+ residential IPs in 190+ countries Rotating & sticky sessions Non-expiring traffic Free trial available Country, state & city targeting HTTP, HTTPS & SOCKS5 support 🎁 Use code PROXY90 for 10% off.
	🚀 Obscura × ProxyEmpire Using Obscura for AI agents, browser automation, or web scraping? Power it with reliable residential and mobile proxies from ProxyEmpire. 🌍 30M+ residential IPs in 170+ countries 📱 4G/5G mobile proxies 🔄 Rotating & sticky sessions 🎯 City, region & ISP targeting 🔐 HTTP, HTTPS & SOCKS5 support 🎁 Use code OBSCURA35 for a 35% recurring discount. Better proxies. Fewer blocks. More scalable automation.
	MangoProxy provides residential, ISP, datacenter, and mobile proxies in 200+ countries. Trusted by businesses worldwide for stable connections, fast response times, and scalable proxy infrastructure. Use Promo code OBSCURA for 8% off Static ISP Proxies.
	9Proxy provides residential proxies from just $0.018/IP or $0.68/GB. 20M+ IPs across 90+ countries. Sticky or rotating sessions, managed from desktop or mobile app.
	NodeMaven — the most reliable proxy provider with the highest quality IPs on the market. Built for automation, web scraping, SEO research, and social media management. 99.9% uptime Sticky sessions up to 7 days IP filtering on every proxy No KYC required Cashback on traffic — earn up to 10% back 🎁 Use code OBSCURA35 for 35% off Mobile & Residential, or OBSCURA40 for 40% off ISP (Static) proxies.
	Rapidproxy — A residential proxy platform with 90M+ real IPs across 200+ countries. It supports rotation, geo-targeting, and high concurrency to improve scraping success. Start your free trial today! Flexible pricing starting from $0.65/GB Traffic that never expires Supports HTTP / HTTPS / SOCKS5 protocols High-speed, low-latency network built for scale 🎁 Use discount code RAPID10 to get 10% off.

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"
Linux ARM64 (aarch64)
curl -LO https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura/releases/latest/download/obscura-aarch64-linux.tar.gz
tar xzf obscura-aarch64-linux.tar.gz
Arch Linux (AUR)
yay -S obscura-browser
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+.

Docker

docker run -d --name obscura -p 127.0.0.1:9222:9222 h4ckf0r0day/obscura

Image on Docker Hub. Multi-stage build on distroless/cc, no shell, no package manager, ~57 MB compressed.

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
Stream the raw response body verbatim (binary-safe; bypasses the JS/DOM layer).
Use this for images, JSON, JS, CSS, or any non-HTML resource.
obscura fetch https://picsum.photos/200/300 --dump original > photo.jpg
List every sub-resource URL the page would fetch (NDJSON; one record per asset)
obscura fetch https://example.com --dump assets
Fetch through an HTTP or SOCKS proxy
obscura --proxy socks5://127.0.0.1:1080 fetch https://example.com --dump text
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
Scrape workers inherit the global proxy
obscura --proxy http://127.0.0.1:8080 scrape https://example.com https://news.ycombinator.com

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 |

The full benchmark suite (WPT conformance, obstacle course, real-world corpus, and vs-Chrome speed) lives in a separate repo: https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura-benchmark

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

Tuning V8

Obscura embeds V8 directly. Use --v8-flags to pass raw flags through to V8, same syntax as Chromium's --js-flags and Node's command-line flags. Most common use is raising the heap cap to fix JavaScript heap out of memory on JS-heavy pages:

obscura --v8-flags "--max-old-space-size=4096" fetch <url>

Heavy SPAs (script execution budget)

Obscura caps the page's script-execution phase so one slow or hung page cannot stall a worker. The default budget is 30s; pages that finish sooner return immediately, so the cap only affects pages that keep running. A very heavy React/Vue/Angular SPA on a slow network can need more time to boot before it fires its data requests. Raise the budget with OBSCURASCRIPTDEADLINE_MS (milliseconds), and pair it with a matching navigation timeout in your CDP client:

OBSCURASCRIPTDEADLINE_MS=60000 obscura serve --port 9222

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, links, markdown, assets (NDJSON of every sub-resource URL the page references), or original (raw response body) | | --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 | | --proxy | — | Inherited global HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy URL |

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 | | --proxy | — | Inherited global HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy URL for all workers |

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Obscura ships an MCP server that exposes browser automation tools to AI agents (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.).

Start

stdio (default) — for Claude Desktop and MCP clients that launch a subprocess:

obscura mcp

HTTP — for clients that connect over the network:

obscura mcp --http --port 8080
endpoint: http://127.0.0.1:8080/mcp

Optional flags (both transports):

| Flag | Description | |------|-------------| | --proxy <URL> | HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy | | --user-agent <UA> | Custom User-Agent string | | --stealth | Enable anti-detection mode |

Claude Desktop config

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "obscura": {
      "command": "obscura",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

| Tool | Description | |------|-------------| | browser_navigate | Navigate to a URL (url, optional waitUntil: load / domcontentloaded / networkidle0) | | browser_snapshot | Return the current page URL, title, and body text | | browser_click | Click an element by CSS selector | | browser_fill | Set an input value (triggers input + change events) | | browser_type | Append text to an input | | browserpresskey | Dispatch a keyboard event (key, optional selector) | | browserselectoption | Select an <option> by value or text | | browser_evaluate | Evaluate a JavaScript expression and return the result | | browserwaitfor | Wait for a CSS selector to appear (selector, optional timeout in seconds) | | browsernetworkrequests | List network requests made by the current page | | browserconsolemessages | Return console messages logged by the page | | browser_close | Close the page and reset browser state |

Integrations

• Hermes agent plugin: run Hermes agent browser tasks on Obscura. The plugin spawns obscura serve per session (or connects to an already running server) and drives it over CDP, with optional --stealth.

License

Apache 2.0