Obscura: a 70MB Chromium-free headless browser in Rust that drops into Puppeteer/Playwright
thisguyknowsai · x · 2026-09-14
A developer built Obscura, a headless browser rewritten from scratch in Rust with zero Chromium: one 70MB binary (vs Chrome's 300MB+), 30MB memory (vs 200MB+), 84ms page loads (vs 800ms), and instant startup. It runs real JavaScript via V8 and speaks the full Chrome DevTools Protocol, so existing Puppeteer and Playwright scripts work unchanged by pointing connect() at ws://127.0.0.1:9222. Screenshots, full-page captures, screencasting and PDF export run on its own native rendering engine — no Node.js, no dependencies.
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