← Back to Discover

Obscura

Open source headless browser engine written in Rust for AI agents and web scraping. It speaks the Chrome DevTools Protocol, works with Puppeteer and Playwright, and includes an MCP server and an optional stealth mode.

Browser automationMCP servers
Visit website ↗

What it does

Obscura is a headless browser engine written in Rust. It runs JavaScript through V8 and implements the Chrome DevTools Protocol, so Puppeteer and Playwright scripts can connect to it much as they would to headless Chrome. Official builds also render pages, capturing screenshots and exporting PDFs without Chromium. From the command line you can fetch a page and dump HTML, text, links or Markdown, scrape many URLs in parallel, or start a DevTools server. An MCP server exposes browser tools such as navigate, snapshot, click, fill and screenshot to AI agents and MCP clients. An optional stealth mode randomises browser fingerprints and blocks trackers. The project's own benchmarks list about 30 MB of memory and instant startup, against 200 MB or more for headless Chrome, though it notes that long-tail CSS, some web APIs and media playback may differ from Chromium. A hosted Obscura Cloud is in development with a waitlist, and the open-source engine stays Apache 2.0 licensed.

Capabilities

  • Runs JavaScript with V8 and speaks the Chrome DevTools Protocol for Puppeteer and Playwright
  • Fetch, parallel scrape and DevTools server modes on the command line
  • Built-in MCP server with browser tools for AI agents
  • Screenshots and PDF export from its own rendering engine
  • Optional stealth mode with anti-fingerprinting and tracker blocking
  • Blocks fetches to private network addresses by default as SSRF protection

When to use it

  • You run many browser sessions for agents or scrapers and want low memory use
  • You want to give an MCP client such as Claude Desktop a set of browser tools
  • You have Puppeteer or Playwright scripts and want a smaller engine to run them against