Top all-time · #2981
Browserless
Company blog · browserless.io/blog · on HN as mrskitchprogrammingwebai
Browserless is the company blog at browserless.io, writing about programming, web and ai. Since 2017, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 48 times, most often “Browserless.io – Headless browser service”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters mention browserless.io as a hosted headless browser service for scraping, testing, screenshots and running Puppeteer in containers. The comments concern the product, not any writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Give AI agents a cloud browser that won't crash or get blocked. Connect over MCP, Puppeteer, or Playwright with stealth and Authenticated Profiles built in.
Most-linked posts?
- Browserless.io – Headless browser service10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-03-19
- /5 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2017-09-19
- /5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-08-19
What Hacker News says?
Hey! I just did/am doing an AMA on dev.to (located here: https://dev.to/joelgriffith/i-m-the-creator-of-browserless-i... ). I run a one-person (me!), bootstrapped business called browserless ( https://browserless.io ). I started it after trying to wrangle headless Chrome for a wishlist app, and desperately needing something like it. Obviously it wasn't around, so I pivoted and built it from the ground up. I'd be sup…
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on “Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?”Submitted The /unblock API from Browserless: dodging bot detection as a service as a story · 176 points
HN discussionI've started one after listening to a lot of indiehackers podcast's. Mine is https://browserless.io , which is IaaS, and I just hist ~$1k/mo at about the 3 month mark. Still not providing the majority of my income, however it's growing to the point where it will in a year or so, depending how things go. If anything else it's been a wickedly fun ride, and I've learned quite a bit in doing it.
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on “Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?”Submitted How we manage individual user concurrencies with Nginx and Lua as a story · 66 points
HN discussionHave you seen _my_ startup ( https://browserless.io/ ). The stability part is something I’m trying to solve once and for all with this project.
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on “PhantomJS: Archiving the project, suspending development”Submitted How and why we ripped our open source product apart for a full rebuild as a story · 22 points
HN discussionI'm not sure if I'd call it simple, but the product itself is fairly straightforward (at least to me :). I run a SaaS product called browserless ( https://browserless.io ). Goal here was to make it really simple to run headless browser work in a production environment, without worrying about all the provisioning and maintenance. However, like anything simple on the exterior, there's still layers of complexity behind…
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on “Ask HN: What is an example of a super simple SaaS that is profitable?”Submitted Using browserless.io to train your LLMs as a story · 8 points
HN discussionWeird question: Since you mention 'bare-metal' and this is "enables you to run Postgres in the browser" UH, could you do: bare_metal --> HeadlessGPU-Chrome --> PGLite with whatever orchesrtration and you have a an automatable 'browser' that can scrape/store/logic/log/be-config'd from/lookup directly to your browserDB and maybe run a fastAPI ontop of such that you have a full stack, baremetal, headless, browserDB/fas…
Comment linking /blog/browserless-gpu-instances
on “Show HN: PGlite – in-browser WASM Postgres with pgvector and live sync”Submitted Launch HN: Browserless. Hosted headless Chrome as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI’d recommend puppeteer or some other Chrome driver. It’s fast and resilient even on single page apps. If you’re looking to run it on a Linux machine also take a look at https://browserless.io (full disclosure I’m the creator of that site).
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on “Ask HN: What are best tools for web scraping?”Submitted Lessons Learnt from Writing an AI Agent as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIf Google cloud ain’t your jam then checkout browserless ( https://browserless.io/ ). It can be considerably cheaper under certain situations, and we’ve been up and running for almost a year. Happy to answer questions if anyone has any. EDIT: We’ve got stuff on GH: https://github.com/joelgriffith/browserless , and startup is under 100ms most of the time. Fonts and other things “just work” as well, plus there’s a sle…
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on “Headless Chrome support in Cloud Functions and App Engine”Submitted Stream login windows during Puppeteer scripts, with our Hybrid Automations as a story · 6 points
HN discussionFWIW there's a lot of things Chrome won't do properly out of the box (fonts, emojis'... more). Most projects like this will work for _most_ of the web, but there's a lot of nuance in getting it working across the board. This is something I've been working on for quite some time: https://browserless.io
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on “URL to PDF Microservice”Submitted How to horizontally scale headless Chrome as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIf you're interested in running the puppeteer in containers, take a look at chrome-aws-lambda[1] and browserless docker container[2] Not affiliated with browserless, but they do have a free/paid cloud service. https://www.browserless.io [1] https://github.com/alixaxel/chrome-aws-lambda [2] https://github.com/browserless/chrome
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on “Ask HN: What are the best tools for web scraping in 2022?”Submitted Browserless.io – Headless browser service as a story · 3 points
HN discussionReally depends on how big your scraping operation is going to be. These days there's a lot of "managed" providers that give you headless browsers / proxy rotators through an easy API so it's relatively easy to plug them into your code. Examples of these would be https://www.browserless.io or https://www.scrapingbee.com for headless browsers to render JS. From my work experience of working on a large scraping stack w…
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on “Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?”Submitted Advanced issues to consider when managing Chrome on AWS as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI started https://www.browserless.io/ when I found out that there wasn't a good hosted solution for headless-browser work. There's a ton of other higher-level services that do things like screenshots and pdfs, but what if I needed something that those services didn't cover (and had to scale out to 100's of concurrent sessions). I didn't really set out to do this service, but it came after _not_ finding it anywhere e…
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on “Ask HN: How did you start your business?”Submitted Browserless.io Now Supports GPU's as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLooking over the API docs now https://docs.hyperbeam.com/start-chromium-session First thing that comes to my mind is... this is kind of like Puppeteer. Even if that is what they are using in the background... would they ever expose it so existing Puppeteer apps could plug and play (like https://www.browserless.io/ )?
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on “Show HN: Browse HN Together in Three.js”Submitted How to extract travel data at scale with Puppeteer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionObviously tooting my own horn here, but these are some products: - https://checklyhq.com - synthetic monitoring - https://microlink.io - automation - https://www.browserless.io - testing - https://www.scrapingbee.com/ - scraping All are business leveraging these types of frameworks
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on “Theheadless.dev – open source Puppeteer and Playwright knowledge base”Submitted Browserless: Scalable headless Chrome instances as a service as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHeads up that the article's first link to your site is broken The link is showing up as https://sourcesort.com/interview/browserless.io instead of https://browserless.io
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on “Creating an open-source solution to the headaches of headless browsers”Submitted Browserless Now Works in LangChain as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf you’re worried about the security risks, edge cases, maintenance pain and scaling challenges of self hosting there are various solid hosted alternatives: - https://browserless.io - low level browser control - https://scrapingbee.com - scraping specialists - https://urlbox.com - screenshot specialists* They’re all profitable and have been around for years so you can depend on the businesses and the tech. * Disclos…
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on “Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots”Submitted We pick puppeteer over Selenium almost every time as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
