Introduction

Obscura is an open-source headless browser engine written in Rust. It runs JavaScript via V8, speaks the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and works as a drop-in replacement for headless Chrome with Puppeteer and Playwright.

Versus headless Chrome

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

Rendering and stealth are both first-class capabilities. Release builds support screenshots, scroll-aware layout, activity-driven CDP screencasting, and raster PDF export; stealth builds retain all of those surfaces while adding the wreq/BoringSSL transport and browser-identity protections.

Quickstart

• Installation
• Your first fetch
• Extract data
• Connect Puppeteer or Playwright

Guides

• Build from source
• Configure stealth and proxies
• Markdown extraction
• Use with Puppeteer
• Use with Playwright
• Use the MCP server
• Use as a Rust library
• Persist cookies and storage
• Intercept and modify requests
• Run in production at scale

Reference

• CLI reference
• Environment variables

Contributing

• Architecture overview
• Adding a CDP method or Web API
• Testing and debugging

Links

• Source: https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura
• Releases: https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura/releases
• Issues: https://github.com/h4ckf0r0day/obscura/issues

License: Apache-2.0.