MCP Servers

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 |

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"

# 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+.

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

# 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

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 |

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

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, or links | | --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 | | --quiet | off | Suppress banner |

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 |

License

Apache 2.0