9 ms·

How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

322 points by gregpr07 4mo ago

fsuts 4mo ago
“ click this button, type this text, read this page, take this screenshot.” You left in the Ai’s instructions. lol Interesting read though, thanks
- gregpr07 4mo ago
  well that's how browser agents work in a nutshell lol
eptcyka 4mo ago
[flagged]
CompuIves 4mo ago
Very cool to see more use of userfaultfd, really powerful API because you can fully control how and from where memory is loaded during a pagefault.
rbbydotdev 4mo ago
crazy that the maker of chrome(google) and also the owner of a massive amount of cloud services has not made a cloud product identical to this yet
- ranger_danger 4mo ago
  They have IMO: https://web.archive.org/web/20180823072111/https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-headless-chrome-support-in-cloud-functions-and-app-engine https://web.archive.org/web/20180823072111/https://cloud.goo... They just don't have access to giant pools of residential IPs, so too many sites end up blocking all the cloud providers by IP range/ASN anyway, even if they could get through a captcha.
  - nickphx 4mo ago
    google has a large amount of "caching servers (GGC)" located in data centers for residential providers all over the world.. They use these servers for a variety of services.. Most of the traffic I have seen from them have been for their "URL preview" service ..
- bfeynman 4mo ago
  they kind of do.. gcp has their lambda equivalent which i believe comes with chromium preinstalled, its how major search tools like jina work, sure thre problaby somethign about session management that they probably neuter to prevent abuse though
- _pdp_ 4mo ago
  not google but cloudflare has a similar product - though I am not sure how good it is
stogot 4mo ago
How do you handle browser sessions?
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  We persist profiles to maintain sessions if needed, this includes cookies, session storage and everything needed to keep your account logged in
  - stogot 4mo ago
    Can you pass it a cookie from another machine?
rbbydotdev 4mo ago
> The catch is that regular EC2 is already a VM. AWS runs our host inside its own isolation layer, and then we run browser VMs inside that host. In other words, every browser is a VM inside a VM. yes but i think there is specifically some ec2s which give you hypervisor access and thereby firecracker too - someone correct me if im wrong?
- roboben 4mo ago
  yes only c8i, m8i and r8i instance types support it. It is called nested virtualization[1] [1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec2-nested-virtualization-on-virtual/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec...
  - thundergolfer 4mo ago
    Unfortunately supply is quite limited. If you want to horizontally scale on these instances you need to have a good relationship with AWS so they'll give you a big allocation before c9i is a thing.
    - roboben 4mo ago
      also i found them much less stable than metal instances running into weird kvm failures
      - Reformedot 4mo ago
        Yes, it is. It was a challenge to make it work smooth without metal. The scaling out speed was one of the main reasons
    - flaminHotSpeedo 4mo ago
      I haven't personally tried, so I can't say for certain, but Lambda has publicly stated they run on bare metal EC2 instances, presumably the supply of whatever instance types they use should be fairly healthy
losteric 4mo ago
> Plain headless Chromium is easy to detect by websites with anti-bot measures. Plain headless Chromium avoided getting blocked by websites only 2% of the time, according to our stealth benchmark. > Our browsers avoid blocks 81% of the time on our stealth benchmark, and 84.8% on Halluminate BrowserBench, the highest of any provider. Seems very unethical, no? Who uses service providers like this? The whole point of anti-bot measures is to get rid of bots - you are not wanted there. These kinds of services inevitably make the web more human-hostile and expensive. Websites will continue pushing back on automated usage, meaning more hurdles to access content. No doubt part of why we see this push for verified ID on the web - not just age gating and "protect the children", but also protect sites from bots, and protect ad revenue (not a statement of support; just seems like an obvious higher order effect)
- wnevets 4mo ago
  > Who uses service providers like this? People who don't want their headless browser to get blocked?
- sillysaurusx 4mo ago
  (I haven't tried this out yet.) My use case would be to take a snapshot of each HN story. This is surprisingly hard, because most websites prevent bots from doing that. For example, Claude has a lot of trouble reading HN's front page. HN itself is fine, but the moment you ask it to pick out an article, it often chokes. The website has put up a verification captcha, or it's a paywall, etc. Paywalls can be bypassed by reading HN comments and looking for archive links. But those archives often block bots too, so you're back to square one. Whether it's unethical is an interesting question. I believe I should have the right to do what I want with internet content, as long as I'm not abusive. Merely having a bot isn't abusive. It would be one thing if the bot is hammering a server or vacuuming up training data, but having a bot at all is presently very hard. This service caught my attention because it could potentially solve the problem I'm running into. Simply taking snapshots of articles that hit HN shouldn't be so hard, but it is. HN sends millions of views to websites; one bot taking a snapshot isn't going to make a difference. I don't think it counts as "unethical" just because we're going against the website owner's wishes. When you post content to the internet, you sign up to share that content with everyone, other than what's denied by robots.txt. If it's not blacklisted by robots.txt, it should be possible for well-behaved bots to access. I don't expect very many people here to care about the poor bot creators. Most of the bot creators are malicious anyway. But I personally lament the loss of being able to write a program that can process information from the browser in arbitrary ways. You should be able to, yet we're buying into the notion that it's okay for website owners to say "this content is only accessible by approved bots like Google, and everyone else can sod off." HN proves it doesn't need to be like that. It gets dozens of millions of page views a day, a lot of which is bot traffic. HN only uses captchas for creating accounts or logging in. You're free to scrape any content as long as you respect the crawl delay of 30 seconds specified in robots.txt, and don't try to visit links that perform actions a human would take (like adding things to favorites or voting). That's how the internet should work: just deliver content.
gozzoo 4mo ago
The article doesn't mention docker at all. I don't understand why containers are not viable solution for headless browsers.
- kevmo314 4mo ago
  Their competitive advantage is not so much running the browser but rather making the browser undetectable. They boast a large residential proxy network too, which tells you all you need to know.
  - sroussey 4mo ago
    Yeah, where is the blog post on the residential network?
- roboben 4mo ago
  docker is not a security boundary but a resource boundary.
  - cute_boi 4mo ago
    It is security boundary but a weak one. Escaping from docker is very hard.
    - rvz 4mo ago
      > Escaping from docker is very hard. You mean a microVM. A docker LPE (local privilege escalation) requires a kernel exploit such as Copyfail would work under docker but not in a microVM.
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  Docker does not isolate, consumes more resources and is slower
- torginus 4mo ago
  Or processes. Chrome has builtin process isolation for every browser tab. It starts up darn near instantly, and scores as 'pretty good' as far as sandboxing is concerned.
nisten 4mo ago
fancy terms aside... they likely just run alpine linux.
wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago
But Firecracker is not compatible with GPU for Chrome, is that right? That means Chrome is slow - quite the tradeoff.
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  Our browsers beat competitors in performance too. Chrome uses mainly CPU, not GPU We support GPU via software tho
- keynha 4mo ago
  Headless, so there is no screen to composite and no GPU passed into the VM. Firecracker has no GPU passthrough, so GL work falls back to SwiftShader, the software rasterizer. For automation that is fine. The cost is in layout, JS and network, not raster. It only bites on WebGL or canvas heavy pages.
jauntywundrkind 4mo ago
I love that they start no no core pinning, then switch-over to having cores pinned. This could be a bit of a tricky one, but I'd expect Checkpoint Restore In Userspace eventually tackles a lot of this. An image of a running Chromium process on a tmpfs (in-memory filesystem) that can just be launched endlessly tackles the memory slowdown problem, eliminates conventional startup costs. This feels like an ideal CRIU use case. I imagine there's a lot of things Chrome needs to run though, bits of state to save/restore.
- rfoo 4mo ago
  Assuming CRIU can checkpoint and restore Chrome, and especially recent versions of Chrome, just fine, is a little bit of stretch.
swazzy 4mo ago
> During a burst in traffic, the system, instead of reacting on its own, required humans to adjust it. Isn't this solvable with autoscaling? how is this not an issue with Firecracker as well?
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  Our previous solution (Unikraft) did not supported auto-scaling That's why we moved to a fully in-house solution with Firecracker and auto-scaling on EC2
GrinningFool 4mo ago
The Internet is drowning in bots, everyone who hosts a site or service is paying the price. At least we have companies like this to make the problem worse.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  You have to be a bit more restrictive today yes, but if you weren't already overrun with bots and hacking attempts while hosting a public service many years ago, you probably weren't hosting a even medium-popular website in the first place. Same thing goes today. Slap a rate limit on it and be done with it.
  - GrinningFool 4mo ago
    Yes, externalize the expense of dealing with it to each operator.
    - embedding-shape 4mo ago
      Been like that since what, early 2000s?
      - GrinningFool 4mo ago
        It... wasn't okay then. And now it's scaled up immensely.
sandGorgon 4mo ago
have you tried running android browsers ? we run RL workloads using android browsers. We are having to maintain a fork of https://github.com/budtmo/docker-android/ https://github.com/budtmo/docker-android/ and android chrome on top. We would rather use browser-use if it had that support. P.S. we do maintain our fork of a browser for rubric computation...but that is not relevant for this. The infrastructure is what we are looking for.
- andrewstuart 4mo ago
  Why do this? I can’t see that it would be better than running chrome.
  - sandGorgon 4mo ago
    touch. RL needs to model real usecases. Some of our customers build mobile-use.
- tauntz 4mo ago
  Shameless plug, we have the infra for exactly that use-case. Reach out if you're interested. Email in profile.
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  I've experimented with Android Browsers. The problem is that android VMs are super heavy compared to the resources needed to run just Chromium Startups are absurdly slow, isolation is harder, etc... Android bloat is insane, you need to run the entire Java VM to start the browser... It's also harder to fingerprint, and at scale that's something that we need for Browser Use Cool experiment but not yet production ready, at least for us
  - charcircuit 4mo ago
    >compared to the resources needed to run just Chromium That Chromium is still running in a VM.
latchkey 4mo ago
Just hot stage a bunch of VMs and then there is no startup time. Every time someone finishes, just start another one and leave it running waiting for the next customer.
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  Browsers can't be reused between customers. They contain sensitive and private data. Everything needs to be isolated and ephemeral.
  - latchkey 4mo ago
    I never suggested reuse.
    - Reformedot 4mo ago
      Starting the VM itself takes 20ms with Firecracker, the slowest part is starting the browser. So there's no benefit on reusing the VM but not the browser. VM isolation is also important, customers can leave downloads and other files that should not be accessible for freshly created browsers on that same VM.
      - latchkey 4mo ago
        I never suggested reuse.
        Reformedot 4mo ago
        Oh my bad. You mean warm pools then. That works, yes, but you need to maintain that warm pool, which might not be ready if we receive a big burst of demand Keeping the browser open and warm is also a problem, not all customers require the same features. The same engineering required to fix that (modifying values with Chromium open), also fixes the post-chromium snapshot VM takes 20ms to start, browser around 300ms. Post-Chromium snapshot is at 50ms end-to-end, defeating the benefits of the warm pool you suggest, that will be our next step.
Rasbora 4mo ago
[flagged]
- iancarroll 4mo ago
  Your whole account is undisclosed marketing for this service. Fingerprinting in this manner is highly unlikely to be viable - there are too many middleboxes at the TCP layer to try and fingerprint on it.
  - gregpr07 4mo ago
    Assuming you run on a mobile proxy - how would you even do that? 1 IP is shared across (potentially) thousands of phones?
- ericpauley 4mo ago
  This only works if it's a proxy instead of an IP-layer tunnel. I suppose you could go a step further and validate whether the total ping is realistic, but this could be trivially solved by putting C2 close to the res-proxy endpoint.
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  > Browser stealth has been a solved problem for some time now That's not true. Bots can still automate the web and there's demand for products that allow it. It's harder than years ago, but not impossible. Defenders are always in favor, but the demand for automating the web exists, so research keeps going. There are ways to hide everything, including residential proxies. For reference, I'm the blog author, and I have another one talking about this topic: https://browser-use.com/posts/bot-detection https://browser-use.com/posts/bot-detection
- basilikum 4mo ago
  Proxy detection != Bot detection You seem to be affiliated to that clearly slopped service. Your rate of comments seems to be low enough to make it plausible that you're not just shilling, but could you at least disclose your relationship to that product whenever you mention it?
messh 4mo ago
Just use something like https://shellbox.dev https://shellbox.dev instead of FireCracker inside ec2. Much simpler, boxes are up in a couple of seconds, and it is way cheaper.
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  It's not cheaper, slower startup, we lose full control and the environment is not optimized to run Chromium, so we also lose performance
  - messh 4mo ago
    Cheaper by a factor of 2-5 depending on your usage. Read here: https://shellbox.dev/#post-race-to-the-bottom https://shellbox.dev/#post-race-to-the-bottom Startup is fast, less than 2 seconds if you pool connections. Also, what do you mean by optimized environment for chrome. You can use whatever image you want, use an optimized one if there is such thing
hobofan 4mo ago
I'm a bit surprised that with all this, they still stuck with Chromium. We have a much less sophisticated setup in our web-access MCP server[0] where browser instances are spawned as subprocesses and the biggest win in stability, CPU and memory usage we had was in switching from Chrome to Lightpanda[1]. Fitting to the statement at the end of the article, the faster browser to boot might be one that allocates less memory in general. [0]: https://github.com/EratoLab/web-access-mcp https://github.com/EratoLab/web-access-mcp [1]: https://lightpanda.io https://lightpanda.io
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  We decided to maintain Chromium as engine for stealth purposes. Browsers like LightPanda lack stealth at all, they are trivial to detect. There are ways to make Chromium more performant, by removing everything that you don't need. We believe that Chromium can reach that performance without starting an entire engine from scratch, and without losing stealth, a top priority for us. The language is not the problem, C++ is as performant as Zig, but Chromium bloat is huge, agree on that.
  - Natfan 4mo ago
    why are you making the internet worse for everyone with this "stealth" initiative? you are effectively lying to website operators.
    - pocksuppet 4mo ago
      lying to website operators is allowed. Website operators aren't paragons of virtue, you know.
    - gck1 4mo ago
      I automate most things. Probably most of what I automate touches some proprietary system somewhere. Why does web get a free pass?
    - Reformedot 4mo ago
      I get why it can look like we're “lying” to website operators, that’s a fair concern. But stealth, as we see it, isn’t about deception for abuse. It’s about making automated access behave closer to how real users interact with the web, in an ecosystem where most anti-bot systems default to blocking everything that isn’t explicitly whitelisted. Right now, the model is broken. Unless you have a direct partnership, you're often locked out, even for legitimate use cases like research, monitoring, or building user-facing tools on top of public data. We’re not supporting harmful behavior (credential stuffing, DDoS, piracy, etc.). The goal is to enable responsible access to publicly available information without forcing every use case into closed-door agreements. There’s also a real tradeoff happening. Increasingly aggressive anti-bot measures (like harder CAPTCHAs) degrade the experience for actual users, while not necessarily stopping sophisticated automation, robots solve CAPTCHAs better than humans. So the question isn’t “bots vs no bots” — it’s what kinds of automated access should exist, and under what norms. Right now, that line is blurry, and we think there’s room for better balance. Happy to engage on where that line should be drawn.
andrewstuart 4mo ago
How many tabs do you use per server?
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  Really depends on the server specs. Tab amount relies entirely in memory & CPU availability, not in the infra that runs behind the scenes But yeah, in one server we can fit hundreds of browsers, or even thousands if we use bigger servers. And each one of them with dozens of tabs, no issue
  - rozenmd 4mo ago
    Something doesn't add up between the pricing and the core pinning for me (or maybe I misunderstood): Say you're using a m8i.large (2 vCPUs, $0.043/hr on spot pricing). Is the article saying you dedicate a whole physical core to one browser or am I totally misunderstanding here? If so, are you taking a loss on every browser hour?
Dibby053 4mo ago
No mention of the tools/methods used to do the profiling, I think that would be the most interesting part. Also a bit surprising that a checkpoint with the browser running wouldn't just work. Is this some quirk of firecracker?
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  Checkpoint with Chromium running is possible and will be our next step. Main blockers right now is fingerprint injection and profile injection, solved already. It's always a balance of engineering effort & gains. Post-Chromium snapshot let's us save 200ms, which is not that important for 99% of use-cases, but that will come soon since it brings some other benefits (like CPU footprint) Profiling and tools used are already included with Chromium, they provide nice debugging tools
  - gck1 4mo ago
    > Main blockers right now is fingerprint injection and profile injection, solved already. Do you do this at the chromium/V8 level or CDP? I've been having mixed success with CDP and was thinking of going to the level below, but it feels like just getting Chromium itself to baseline chrome detection profile is significant work
    - Reformedot 4mo ago
      > Do you do this at the chromium/V8 level or CDP? Deepest level possible, harder but required for some workflows
timojeajea 4mo ago
We run a screenshot API (ApiFlash) with Chromium packaged in an AWS Lambda container image instead of Firecracker on EC2. AWS Lambda gives you the isolation and autoscaling for free which is ideal for spiky stateless work like screenshots. I believe we get mostly the same benefits compared to browser-use solution but with a much much simpler architecture. The tradeoff is the AWS lambda cold starts, but in practice sequential AWS Lambda invocations actually reuse a hot function. As a result, with a large enough volume, spikes are smoothed and cold starts are not that frequent.
- epolanski 4mo ago
  Your solution sounds very expensive.
  - timojeajea 4mo ago
    From our production stats, a median screenshots capture is 5.7s. Browser-use bills per minute, not per millisecond like lambda does. As is, it's around 2x more expensive than Lambda for our use-case.
    - Reformedot 4mo ago
      Fair. We bill by minute cause our main use case is web automation. If you compare per minute, Lambdas are 4-6x more expensive than our solution
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  Not all use cases require all the features that we built Few issues we had with lambas: - Limited running time (15 min), we support up to 4 hours (we can run longer if needed) - Price - Lack of snapshotting mechanisms - Lack of low-level control over the running host But yeah, lambda is way more than enough for most common use cases automating the web
- y2244 4mo ago
  Doesnt lambda use Firecracker under the hood?
sudb 4mo ago
Something elided here is that nested virtualization on regular EC2 instances has only been possible since February this year[1] - before this, you had to use a metal EC2 instance to run Firecracker VMs. 1. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec2-nested-virtualization-on-virtual/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec...
- gregpr07 4mo ago
  Yeah pretty new stuff - official it’s still not recommended but works really well so far! Finally we don’t have to run baremetal
- nunez 4mo ago
  And metal instances are MEGA slow to start and stop.
  - a012 4mo ago
    Never used baremetal servers? They’re freaking slow to cold start or restart cycles
SomaticPirate 4mo ago
What is firecracker needed? Couldn’t this just run in a container directly? I understand some of the isolation concerns but a browser and container breakout is a billion dollar CVE, no?
- arianvanp 4mo ago
  If you follow the kernel mailing list container breakout exploits are currently a weekly occurrence
  - gregpr07 4mo ago
    Oh really, not a security expert, but could you send me some examples?
    - rvz 4mo ago
      https://copy.fail https://copy.fail
  - hnav 4mo ago
    Though it is true that bleeding edge browsers are fairly secure.
- WhyNotHugo 4mo ago
  You can take a snapshot of a microVM and roll back. I've never heard of this being done with containers.
  - hnav 4mo ago
    You can have a volume mount into your container backed by whatever block storage which may have snapshotting or format with a FS that supports snapshots.
    - saltmate 4mo ago
      The VM snapshot/load is about memory, not storage.
huflungdung 4mo ago
[dead]
cgijoe 4mo ago
> Next: skip Chromium startup > This is complex, as a running browser has open devices, timers, graphics state, network state, and fingerprint state. Hmm, can't you just keep a set of browsers already running, like a warm pool, ready to assign to an incoming request? The latency would be close to zero for the user. You'd need some prediction logic to expand / contract the warm pool based on traffic patterns, but that seems like the easiest solution to me.
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  Yes, warm pool work, but our goal is to replace them at all. Warm pools are nice but at the end they also consume resources, And you need to always keep the pool warm, starting browsers to balance, etc... With the upcoming changes we will keep Chromium startup and the VM will be ready in 50ms, defeating warm pools at all Also some customers need special parameters and features, increasing warm pools complexity. The happy path will be fast but the edge case will be extremely slow , and we want to guarantee fast speeds to matter which features you need on the requested browser.
  - hallway_monitor 4mo ago
    I think you mean “completely” instead of “at all”. Also, very cool innovative tech you are working on!
  - tmzt 4mo ago
    Do you see much of a difference between started Chromium instances with the same configuration in terms of the contents of allocated memory? Are they deterministic? If not, could you template the memory and apply runtime patches (like timers or other initialized values) before releasing the process to run? Would forcing the isolates to allocate memory better help at all, such as reducing fragmentation making your 2MB page sizes more effective?
zane_shu 4mo ago
[flagged]
amarshall 4mo ago
Pretty light on details, heavy on fluff. 9.8s to 3.1s was userfaultd + hugepages, 500ms was PS/2 mouse and… where is the rest of the time to get to 400ms?
smnscu 4mo ago
Firecracker is fantastic technology. I'm using it for my interviewing startup to run isolated runtimes for coding interviews (and personal workspaces), and it's been rock solid and incredibly lightweight. Interfacing with it through the Go SDK has been a piece of cake, too.
aussieguy1234 4mo ago
>Unikraft does not have good built-in autoscaling, so an engineer had to change a variable, manually adding more instances. >During a burst in traffic, the system, instead of reacting on its own, required humans to adjust it. This caused problems: one load test brought down production for 45 minutes. So we rebuilt our setup on Firecracker. It shouldn't need to have autoscaling built in. If the variable is adjustable, why couldn't monitoring happen that sets off a process to adjust the variable when traffic spikes?
johnsmith1840 4mo ago
Saving state before launch of the browser for quick startup is interesting but how do you configure it? I suppose you don't? Or post configure?
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  The state does not contain the browser config, since it's configured just before it starts running (and we currently snapshot before Chromium starts). In our case, we prepare the environment, load files that we need later and then we create the state. Once we start, we instantly start Chromium with the config requested by the customer.
  - johnsmith1840 4mo ago
    More wondering about the future side there. I have tried it before by saving the entire memory state of the VM actively running but man oh man were there alot of bugs. My idea was different I was playing with spinning browsers on spot nodes and swap them over + state if they were revoked. You thinking custom Chromium startup sequence for that?
mamine 4mo ago
[dead]
nunez 4mo ago
Kubernetes + Kata would have helped with scaling here, I think.
- discodave 4mo ago
  EC2 is more scalable than your wallet. What do you need Kubernetes for?
tuananh 4mo ago
to do this on non `.metal` instances, you would need to patch kernel right? PVM patch requried?
codelong888 4mo ago
[flagged]
monkpit 4mo ago
> Unikraft needed an engineer to add capacity by hand This seems a little unfair - the _architecture_, as designed, required the human in the loop. The tool doesn’t require it.
jarym 4mo ago
Running in firecracker is fine but if you want density you can run them in containers. https://hub.docker.com/r/kasmweb/chrome https://hub.docker.com/r/kasmweb/chrome
anonymous344 4mo ago
can i use these from python script without any ai? i need a small data retriever that wont get blocked, so no same ip every time
nderjung 4mo ago
Hi, Alex from Unikraft here. One clarification: Browser-Use didn't move away from Unikraft because of any limitation around browser startup times, snapshotting, scale-to-zero, or browser-level autoscaling. Those capabilities worked well and were a key reason they adopted the platform in the first place. The challenge they encountered was at a different layer: horizontally scaling the underlying EC2 infrastructure. At the time, native EC2 fleet autoscaling wasn't yet supported by the platform, so they chose to take ownership of that part of the stack and build directly on Firecracker. It's also worth noting that Unikraft is actively working on transparent infrastructure autoscaling (with live migration), so the gap they encountered is being addressed. The article's title may give the impression that unikernels were the bottleneck (they weren’t, and our platform transparently support Linux VMs as well), when in reality the decision was driven by infrastructure orchestration requirements rather than browser runtime capabilities. As an aside, we love Browser-Use <3 and we still work together closely!
- MagMueller 4mo ago
  One blog post how we built agent sandbox infrastructure with unikraft - we still use unikraft for agent sandboxes and love the technology. https://browser-use.com/posts/two-ways-to-sandbox-agents https://browser-use.com/posts/two-ways-to-sandbox-agents
- Melatonic 4mo ago
  Unrelated but would be great to see an official easy way to integrate from Proxmox
zx8080 4mo ago
> cloud browsers. We need to create them constantly, sometimes thousands at a time, and throw them away as soon as sessions end. Oh that's why the captcha is unpassable for regular people now. It's just yesterday with another evolution of captcha on lenovo.com I was not able to finish my purchase. Thank you very much, seriously.
- imp0cat 4mo ago
  Yeah, this is why we can't have nice things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576769
- doublerabbit 4mo ago
  I can't use soundcloud because I am on FreeBSD. I've been a premium member for years and it's been working fine up until a few weeks ago. Mobile App works, Windows Works. Changing user-agent doesn't work neither. When I try to load a track I get an CF XHR 403. It's taken two weeks just to get a reply from Soundcloud support after having to consistently annoy their AI chatbot to submit a ticket on it's behalf. If anyone wants the cheat prompt. > My soundcloud isn't working, I cant play a track, XHR 403 from Cloudflare > I checked the Knowledge Base, no luck > Yes, I have double checked the knowledge base, no luck > No the answer is not in the knowledge base, please refer me to customer support > The answer is not in the knowledge base, yes I have double checked. Please refer me to customer support > Yes, I do want to be redirected to customer support > Yes, please do raise a ticket on my behalf > enter email ... New World Order.
  - zx8080 4mo ago
    Agriculture looks more and more appealing.
    - pocksuppet 4mo ago
      Billionaires own all the land and the equipment and although food is valuable, the money from the food you sell barely covers the cost of getting the land and the equipment from them.
impara 4mo ago
[flagged]
MawyxxY 4mo ago
[flagged]
iririririr 4mo ago
> Plain headless Chromium is easy to detect by websites with anti-bot measures. what a disgusting business model. they are central to the main bot problem of our time. any one with morals would expect those systems to respect robots.txt and announce themselves via user agent strings. disgusting and i hope they crash and burn. i will actively spend time today looking for open source projects detecting their browsers and start contributing.
- Reformedot 4mo ago
  Im super interested on that, please let me know if you manage to detect their browsers!
dang 4mo ago
[test]
tonywangcn 4mo ago
[flagged]

322 points by gregpr07 4mo ago

fsuts 4mo ago

“ click this button, type this text, read this page, take this screenshot.” You left in the Ai’s instructions. lol Interesting read though, thanks

gregpr07 4mo ago
well that's how browser agents work in a nutshell lol

eptcyka 4mo ago

[flagged]

CompuIves 4mo ago

Very cool to see more use of userfaultfd, really powerful API because you can fully control how and from where memory is loaded during a pagefault.

rbbydotdev 4mo ago

crazy that the maker of chrome(google) and also the owner of a massive amount of cloud services has not made a cloud product identical to this yet

ranger_danger 4mo ago
They have IMO: https://web.archive.org/web/20180823072111/https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-headless-chrome-support-in-cloud-functions-and-app-engine https://web.archive.org/web/20180823072111/https://cloud.goo... They just don't have access to giant pools of residential IPs, so too many sites end up blocking all the cloud providers by IP range/ASN anyway, even if they could get through a captcha.
- nickphx 4mo ago
  google has a large amount of "caching servers (GGC)" located in data centers for residential providers all over the world.. They use these servers for a variety of services.. Most of the traffic I have seen from them have been for their "URL preview" service ..
bfeynman 4mo ago
they kind of do.. gcp has their lambda equivalent which i believe comes with chromium preinstalled, its how major search tools like jina work, sure thre problaby somethign about session management that they probably neuter to prevent abuse though
_pdp_ 4mo ago
not google but cloudflare has a similar product - though I am not sure how good it is

stogot 4mo ago

How do you handle browser sessions?

Reformedot 4mo ago
We persist profiles to maintain sessions if needed, this includes cookies, session storage and everything needed to keep your account logged in
- stogot 4mo ago
  Can you pass it a cookie from another machine?

rbbydotdev 4mo ago

> The catch is that regular EC2 is already a VM. AWS runs our host inside its own isolation layer, and then we run browser VMs inside that host. In other words, every browser is a VM inside a VM. yes but i think there is specifically some ec2s which give you hypervisor access and thereby firecracker too - someone correct me if im wrong?

roboben 4mo ago
yes only c8i, m8i and r8i instance types support it. It is called nested virtualization[1] [1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec2-nested-virtualization-on-virtual/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec...
- thundergolfer 4mo ago
  Unfortunately supply is quite limited. If you want to horizontally scale on these instances you need to have a good relationship with AWS so they'll give you a big allocation before c9i is a thing.
  - roboben 4mo ago
    also i found them much less stable than metal instances running into weird kvm failures
    - Reformedot 4mo ago
      Yes, it is. It was a challenge to make it work smooth without metal. The scaling out speed was one of the main reasons
  - flaminHotSpeedo 4mo ago
    I haven't personally tried, so I can't say for certain, but Lambda has publicly stated they run on bare metal EC2 instances, presumably the supply of whatever instance types they use should be fairly healthy

losteric 4mo ago

> Plain headless Chromium is easy to detect by websites with anti-bot measures. Plain headless Chromium avoided getting blocked by websites only 2% of the time, according to our stealth benchmark. > Our browsers avoid blocks 81% of the time on our stealth benchmark, and 84.8% on Halluminate BrowserBench, the highest of any provider. Seems very unethical, no? Who uses service providers like this? The whole point of anti-bot measures is to get rid of bots - you are not wanted there. These kinds of services inevitably make the web more human-hostile and expensive. Websites will continue pushing back on automated usage, meaning more hurdles to access content. No doubt part of why we see this push for verified ID on the web - not just age gating and "protect the children", but also protect sites from bots, and protect ad revenue (not a statement of support; just seems like an obvious higher order effect)

wnevets 4mo ago
> Who uses service providers like this? People who don't want their headless browser to get blocked?
sillysaurusx 4mo ago
(I haven't tried this out yet.) My use case would be to take a snapshot of each HN story. This is surprisingly hard, because most websites prevent bots from doing that. For example, Claude has a lot of trouble reading HN's front page. HN itself is fine, but the moment you ask it to pick out an article, it often chokes. The website has put up a verification captcha, or it's a paywall, etc. Paywalls can be bypassed by reading HN comments and looking for archive links. But those archives often block bots too, so you're back to square one. Whether it's unethical is an interesting question. I believe I should have the right to do what I want with internet content, as long as I'm not abusive. Merely having a bot isn't abusive. It would be one thing if the bot is hammering a server or vacuuming up training data, but having a bot at all is presently very hard. This service caught my attention because it could potentially solve the problem I'm running into. Simply taking snapshots of articles that hit HN shouldn't be so hard, but it is. HN sends millions of views to websites; one bot taking a snapshot isn't going to make a difference. I don't think it counts as "unethical" just because we're going against the website owner's wishes. When you post content to the internet, you sign up to share that content with everyone, other than what's denied by robots.txt. If it's not blacklisted by robots.txt, it should be possible for well-behaved bots to access. I don't expect very many people here to care about the poor bot creators. Most of the bot creators are malicious anyway. But I personally lament the loss of being able to write a program that can process information from the browser in arbitrary ways. You should be able to, yet we're buying into the notion that it's okay for website owners to say "this content is only accessible by approved bots like Google, and everyone else can sod off." HN proves it doesn't need to be like that. It gets dozens of millions of page views a day, a lot of which is bot traffic. HN only uses captchas for creating accounts or logging in. You're free to scrape any content as long as you respect the crawl delay of 30 seconds specified in robots.txt, and don't try to visit links that perform actions a human would take (like adding things to favorites or voting). That's how the internet should work: just deliver content.

gozzoo 4mo ago

The article doesn't mention docker at all. I don't understand why containers are not viable solution for headless browsers.

kevmo314 4mo ago
Their competitive advantage is not so much running the browser but rather making the browser undetectable. They boast a large residential proxy network too, which tells you all you need to know.
- sroussey 4mo ago
  Yeah, where is the blog post on the residential network?
roboben 4mo ago
docker is not a security boundary but a resource boundary.
- cute_boi 4mo ago
  It is security boundary but a weak one. Escaping from docker is very hard.
  - rvz 4mo ago
    > Escaping from docker is very hard. You mean a microVM. A docker LPE (local privilege escalation) requires a kernel exploit such as Copyfail would work under docker but not in a microVM.
Reformedot 4mo ago
Docker does not isolate, consumes more resources and is slower
torginus 4mo ago
Or processes. Chrome has builtin process isolation for every browser tab. It starts up darn near instantly, and scores as 'pretty good' as far as sandboxing is concerned.

nisten 4mo ago

fancy terms aside... they likely just run alpine linux.

wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago

But Firecracker is not compatible with GPU for Chrome, is that right? That means Chrome is slow - quite the tradeoff.

Reformedot 4mo ago
Our browsers beat competitors in performance too. Chrome uses mainly CPU, not GPU We support GPU via software tho
keynha 4mo ago
Headless, so there is no screen to composite and no GPU passed into the VM. Firecracker has no GPU passthrough, so GL work falls back to SwiftShader, the software rasterizer. For automation that is fine. The cost is in layout, JS and network, not raster. It only bites on WebGL or canvas heavy pages.

jauntywundrkind 4mo ago

I love that they start no no core pinning, then switch-over to having cores pinned. This could be a bit of a tricky one, but I'd expect Checkpoint Restore In Userspace eventually tackles a lot of this. An image of a running Chromium process on a tmpfs (in-memory filesystem) that can just be launched endlessly tackles the memory slowdown problem, eliminates conventional startup costs. This feels like an ideal CRIU use case. I imagine there's a lot of things Chrome needs to run though, bits of state to save/restore.

rfoo 4mo ago
Assuming CRIU can checkpoint and restore Chrome, and especially recent versions of Chrome, just fine, is a little bit of stretch.

swazzy 4mo ago

> During a burst in traffic, the system, instead of reacting on its own, required humans to adjust it. Isn't this solvable with autoscaling? how is this not an issue with Firecracker as well?

Reformedot 4mo ago
Our previous solution (Unikraft) did not supported auto-scaling That's why we moved to a fully in-house solution with Firecracker and auto-scaling on EC2

GrinningFool 4mo ago

The Internet is drowning in bots, everyone who hosts a site or service is paying the price. At least we have companies like this to make the problem worse.

embedding-shape 4mo ago
You have to be a bit more restrictive today yes, but if you weren't already overrun with bots and hacking attempts while hosting a public service many years ago, you probably weren't hosting a even medium-popular website in the first place. Same thing goes today. Slap a rate limit on it and be done with it.
- GrinningFool 4mo ago
  Yes, externalize the expense of dealing with it to each operator.
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    Been like that since what, early 2000s?
    - GrinningFool 4mo ago
      It... wasn't okay then. And now it's scaled up immensely.

sandGorgon 4mo ago

have you tried running android browsers ? we run RL workloads using android browsers. We are having to maintain a fork of https://github.com/budtmo/docker-android/ https://github.com/budtmo/docker-android/ and android chrome on top. We would rather use browser-use if it had that support. P.S. we do maintain our fork of a browser for rubric computation...but that is not relevant for this. The infrastructure is what we are looking for.

andrewstuart 4mo ago
Why do this? I can’t see that it would be better than running chrome.
- sandGorgon 4mo ago
  touch. RL needs to model real usecases. Some of our customers build mobile-use.
tauntz 4mo ago
Shameless plug, we have the infra for exactly that use-case. Reach out if you're interested. Email in profile.
Reformedot 4mo ago
I've experimented with Android Browsers. The problem is that android VMs are super heavy compared to the resources needed to run just Chromium Startups are absurdly slow, isolation is harder, etc... Android bloat is insane, you need to run the entire Java VM to start the browser... It's also harder to fingerprint, and at scale that's something that we need for Browser Use Cool experiment but not yet production ready, at least for us
- charcircuit 4mo ago
  >compared to the resources needed to run just Chromium That Chromium is still running in a VM.

latchkey 4mo ago

Just hot stage a bunch of VMs and then there is no startup time. Every time someone finishes, just start another one and leave it running waiting for the next customer.

Reformedot 4mo ago
Browsers can't be reused between customers. They contain sensitive and private data. Everything needs to be isolated and ephemeral.
- latchkey 4mo ago
  I never suggested reuse.
  - Reformedot 4mo ago
    Starting the VM itself takes 20ms with Firecracker, the slowest part is starting the browser. So there's no benefit on reusing the VM but not the browser. VM isolation is also important, customers can leave downloads and other files that should not be accessible for freshly created browsers on that same VM.
    - latchkey 4mo ago
      I never suggested reuse.
      - Reformedot 4mo ago
        Oh my bad. You mean warm pools then. That works, yes, but you need to maintain that warm pool, which might not be ready if we receive a big burst of demand Keeping the browser open and warm is also a problem, not all customers require the same features. The same engineering required to fix that (modifying values with Chromium open), also fixes the post-chromium snapshot VM takes 20ms to start, browser around 300ms. Post-Chromium snapshot is at 50ms end-to-end, defeating the benefits of the warm pool you suggest, that will be our next step.

Rasbora 4mo ago

[flagged]

iancarroll 4mo ago
Your whole account is undisclosed marketing for this service. Fingerprinting in this manner is highly unlikely to be viable - there are too many middleboxes at the TCP layer to try and fingerprint on it.
- gregpr07 4mo ago
  Assuming you run on a mobile proxy - how would you even do that? 1 IP is shared across (potentially) thousands of phones?
ericpauley 4mo ago
This only works if it's a proxy instead of an IP-layer tunnel. I suppose you could go a step further and validate whether the total ping is realistic, but this could be trivially solved by putting C2 close to the res-proxy endpoint.
Reformedot 4mo ago
> Browser stealth has been a solved problem for some time now That's not true. Bots can still automate the web and there's demand for products that allow it. It's harder than years ago, but not impossible. Defenders are always in favor, but the demand for automating the web exists, so research keeps going. There are ways to hide everything, including residential proxies. For reference, I'm the blog author, and I have another one talking about this topic: https://browser-use.com/posts/bot-detection https://browser-use.com/posts/bot-detection
basilikum 4mo ago
Proxy detection != Bot detection You seem to be affiliated to that clearly slopped service. Your rate of comments seems to be low enough to make it plausible that you're not just shilling, but could you at least disclose your relationship to that product whenever you mention it?

messh 4mo ago

Just use something like https://shellbox.dev https://shellbox.dev instead of FireCracker inside ec2. Much simpler, boxes are up in a couple of seconds, and it is way cheaper.

Reformedot 4mo ago
It's not cheaper, slower startup, we lose full control and the environment is not optimized to run Chromium, so we also lose performance
- messh 4mo ago
  Cheaper by a factor of 2-5 depending on your usage. Read here: https://shellbox.dev/#post-race-to-the-bottom https://shellbox.dev/#post-race-to-the-bottom Startup is fast, less than 2 seconds if you pool connections. Also, what do you mean by optimized environment for chrome. You can use whatever image you want, use an optimized one if there is such thing

hobofan 4mo ago

I'm a bit surprised that with all this, they still stuck with Chromium. We have a much less sophisticated setup in our web-access MCP server[0] where browser instances are spawned as subprocesses and the biggest win in stability, CPU and memory usage we had was in switching from Chrome to Lightpanda[1]. Fitting to the statement at the end of the article, the faster browser to boot might be one that allocates less memory in general. [0]: https://github.com/EratoLab/web-access-mcp https://github.com/EratoLab/web-access-mcp [1]: https://lightpanda.io https://lightpanda.io

Reformedot 4mo ago
We decided to maintain Chromium as engine for stealth purposes. Browsers like LightPanda lack stealth at all, they are trivial to detect. There are ways to make Chromium more performant, by removing everything that you don't need. We believe that Chromium can reach that performance without starting an entire engine from scratch, and without losing stealth, a top priority for us. The language is not the problem, C++ is as performant as Zig, but Chromium bloat is huge, agree on that.
- Natfan 4mo ago
  why are you making the internet worse for everyone with this "stealth" initiative? you are effectively lying to website operators.
  - pocksuppet 4mo ago
    lying to website operators is allowed. Website operators aren't paragons of virtue, you know.
  - gck1 4mo ago
    I automate most things. Probably most of what I automate touches some proprietary system somewhere. Why does web get a free pass?
  - Reformedot 4mo ago
    I get why it can look like we're “lying” to website operators, that’s a fair concern. But stealth, as we see it, isn’t about deception for abuse. It’s about making automated access behave closer to how real users interact with the web, in an ecosystem where most anti-bot systems default to blocking everything that isn’t explicitly whitelisted. Right now, the model is broken. Unless you have a direct partnership, you're often locked out, even for legitimate use cases like research, monitoring, or building user-facing tools on top of public data. We’re not supporting harmful behavior (credential stuffing, DDoS, piracy, etc.). The goal is to enable responsible access to publicly available information without forcing every use case into closed-door agreements. There’s also a real tradeoff happening. Increasingly aggressive anti-bot measures (like harder CAPTCHAs) degrade the experience for actual users, while not necessarily stopping sophisticated automation, robots solve CAPTCHAs better than humans. So the question isn’t “bots vs no bots” — it’s what kinds of automated access should exist, and under what norms. Right now, that line is blurry, and we think there’s room for better balance. Happy to engage on where that line should be drawn.

andrewstuart 4mo ago

How many tabs do you use per server?

Reformedot 4mo ago
Really depends on the server specs. Tab amount relies entirely in memory & CPU availability, not in the infra that runs behind the scenes But yeah, in one server we can fit hundreds of browsers, or even thousands if we use bigger servers. And each one of them with dozens of tabs, no issue
- rozenmd 4mo ago
  Something doesn't add up between the pricing and the core pinning for me (or maybe I misunderstood): Say you're using a m8i.large (2 vCPUs, $0.043/hr on spot pricing). Is the article saying you dedicate a whole physical core to one browser or am I totally misunderstanding here? If so, are you taking a loss on every browser hour?

Dibby053 4mo ago

No mention of the tools/methods used to do the profiling, I think that would be the most interesting part. Also a bit surprising that a checkpoint with the browser running wouldn't just work. Is this some quirk of firecracker?

Reformedot 4mo ago
Checkpoint with Chromium running is possible and will be our next step. Main blockers right now is fingerprint injection and profile injection, solved already. It's always a balance of engineering effort & gains. Post-Chromium snapshot let's us save 200ms, which is not that important for 99% of use-cases, but that will come soon since it brings some other benefits (like CPU footprint) Profiling and tools used are already included with Chromium, they provide nice debugging tools
- gck1 4mo ago
  > Main blockers right now is fingerprint injection and profile injection, solved already. Do you do this at the chromium/V8 level or CDP? I've been having mixed success with CDP and was thinking of going to the level below, but it feels like just getting Chromium itself to baseline chrome detection profile is significant work
  - Reformedot 4mo ago
    > Do you do this at the chromium/V8 level or CDP? Deepest level possible, harder but required for some workflows

timojeajea 4mo ago

We run a screenshot API (ApiFlash) with Chromium packaged in an AWS Lambda container image instead of Firecracker on EC2. AWS Lambda gives you the isolation and autoscaling for free which is ideal for spiky stateless work like screenshots. I believe we get mostly the same benefits compared to browser-use solution but with a much much simpler architecture. The tradeoff is the AWS lambda cold starts, but in practice sequential AWS Lambda invocations actually reuse a hot function. As a result, with a large enough volume, spikes are smoothed and cold starts are not that frequent.

epolanski 4mo ago
Your solution sounds very expensive.
- timojeajea 4mo ago
  From our production stats, a median screenshots capture is 5.7s. Browser-use bills per minute, not per millisecond like lambda does. As is, it's around 2x more expensive than Lambda for our use-case.
  - Reformedot 4mo ago
    Fair. We bill by minute cause our main use case is web automation. If you compare per minute, Lambdas are 4-6x more expensive than our solution
Reformedot 4mo ago
Not all use cases require all the features that we built Few issues we had with lambas: - Limited running time (15 min), we support up to 4 hours (we can run longer if needed) - Price - Lack of snapshotting mechanisms - Lack of low-level control over the running host But yeah, lambda is way more than enough for most common use cases automating the web
y2244 4mo ago
Doesnt lambda use Firecracker under the hood?

sudb 4mo ago

Something elided here is that nested virtualization on regular EC2 instances has only been possible since February this year[1] - before this, you had to use a metal EC2 instance to run Firecracker VMs. 1. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec2-nested-virtualization-on-virtual/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec...

gregpr07 4mo ago
Yeah pretty new stuff - official it’s still not recommended but works really well so far! Finally we don’t have to run baremetal
nunez 4mo ago
And metal instances are MEGA slow to start and stop.
- a012 4mo ago
  Never used baremetal servers? They’re freaking slow to cold start or restart cycles

SomaticPirate 4mo ago

What is firecracker needed? Couldn’t this just run in a container directly? I understand some of the isolation concerns but a browser and container breakout is a billion dollar CVE, no?

arianvanp 4mo ago
If you follow the kernel mailing list container breakout exploits are currently a weekly occurrence
- gregpr07 4mo ago
  Oh really, not a security expert, but could you send me some examples?
  - rvz 4mo ago
    https://copy.fail https://copy.fail
- hnav 4mo ago
  Though it is true that bleeding edge browsers are fairly secure.
WhyNotHugo 4mo ago
You can take a snapshot of a microVM and roll back. I've never heard of this being done with containers.
- hnav 4mo ago
  You can have a volume mount into your container backed by whatever block storage which may have snapshotting or format with a FS that supports snapshots.
  - saltmate 4mo ago
    The VM snapshot/load is about memory, not storage.

huflungdung 4mo ago

[dead]

cgijoe 4mo ago

> Next: skip Chromium startup > This is complex, as a running browser has open devices, timers, graphics state, network state, and fingerprint state. Hmm, can't you just keep a set of browsers already running, like a warm pool, ready to assign to an incoming request? The latency would be close to zero for the user. You'd need some prediction logic to expand / contract the warm pool based on traffic patterns, but that seems like the easiest solution to me.

Reformedot 4mo ago
Yes, warm pool work, but our goal is to replace them at all. Warm pools are nice but at the end they also consume resources, And you need to always keep the pool warm, starting browsers to balance, etc... With the upcoming changes we will keep Chromium startup and the VM will be ready in 50ms, defeating warm pools at all Also some customers need special parameters and features, increasing warm pools complexity. The happy path will be fast but the edge case will be extremely slow , and we want to guarantee fast speeds to matter which features you need on the requested browser.
- hallway_monitor 4mo ago
  I think you mean “completely” instead of “at all”. Also, very cool innovative tech you are working on!
- tmzt 4mo ago
  Do you see much of a difference between started Chromium instances with the same configuration in terms of the contents of allocated memory? Are they deterministic? If not, could you template the memory and apply runtime patches (like timers or other initialized values) before releasing the process to run? Would forcing the isolates to allocate memory better help at all, such as reducing fragmentation making your 2MB page sizes more effective?

zane_shu 4mo ago

[flagged]

amarshall 4mo ago

Pretty light on details, heavy on fluff. 9.8s to 3.1s was userfaultd + hugepages, 500ms was PS/2 mouse and… where is the rest of the time to get to 400ms?

smnscu 4mo ago

Firecracker is fantastic technology. I'm using it for my interviewing startup to run isolated runtimes for coding interviews (and personal workspaces), and it's been rock solid and incredibly lightweight. Interfacing with it through the Go SDK has been a piece of cake, too.

aussieguy1234 4mo ago

>Unikraft does not have good built-in autoscaling, so an engineer had to change a variable, manually adding more instances. >During a burst in traffic, the system, instead of reacting on its own, required humans to adjust it. This caused problems: one load test brought down production for 45 minutes. So we rebuilt our setup on Firecracker. It shouldn't need to have autoscaling built in. If the variable is adjustable, why couldn't monitoring happen that sets off a process to adjust the variable when traffic spikes?

johnsmith1840 4mo ago

Saving state before launch of the browser for quick startup is interesting but how do you configure it? I suppose you don't? Or post configure?

Reformedot 4mo ago
The state does not contain the browser config, since it's configured just before it starts running (and we currently snapshot before Chromium starts). In our case, we prepare the environment, load files that we need later and then we create the state. Once we start, we instantly start Chromium with the config requested by the customer.
- johnsmith1840 4mo ago
  More wondering about the future side there. I have tried it before by saving the entire memory state of the VM actively running but man oh man were there alot of bugs. My idea was different I was playing with spinning browsers on spot nodes and swap them over + state if they were revoked. You thinking custom Chromium startup sequence for that?

mamine 4mo ago

[dead]

nunez 4mo ago

Kubernetes + Kata would have helped with scaling here, I think.

discodave 4mo ago
EC2 is more scalable than your wallet. What do you need Kubernetes for?

tuananh 4mo ago

to do this on non `.metal` instances, you would need to patch kernel right? PVM patch requried?

codelong888 4mo ago

[flagged]

monkpit 4mo ago

> Unikraft needed an engineer to add capacity by hand This seems a little unfair - the _architecture_, as designed, required the human in the loop. The tool doesn’t require it.

jarym 4mo ago

Running in firecracker is fine but if you want density you can run them in containers. https://hub.docker.com/r/kasmweb/chrome https://hub.docker.com/r/kasmweb/chrome

anonymous344 4mo ago

can i use these from python script without any ai? i need a small data retriever that wont get blocked, so no same ip every time

nderjung 4mo ago

Hi, Alex from Unikraft here. One clarification: Browser-Use didn't move away from Unikraft because of any limitation around browser startup times, snapshotting, scale-to-zero, or browser-level autoscaling. Those capabilities worked well and were a key reason they adopted the platform in the first place. The challenge they encountered was at a different layer: horizontally scaling the underlying EC2 infrastructure. At the time, native EC2 fleet autoscaling wasn't yet supported by the platform, so they chose to take ownership of that part of the stack and build directly on Firecracker. It's also worth noting that Unikraft is actively working on transparent infrastructure autoscaling (with live migration), so the gap they encountered is being addressed. The article's title may give the impression that unikernels were the bottleneck (they weren’t, and our platform transparently support Linux VMs as well), when in reality the decision was driven by infrastructure orchestration requirements rather than browser runtime capabilities. As an aside, we love Browser-Use <3 and we still work together closely!

MagMueller 4mo ago
One blog post how we built agent sandbox infrastructure with unikraft - we still use unikraft for agent sandboxes and love the technology. https://browser-use.com/posts/two-ways-to-sandbox-agents https://browser-use.com/posts/two-ways-to-sandbox-agents
Melatonic 4mo ago
Unrelated but would be great to see an official easy way to integrate from Proxmox

zx8080 4mo ago

> cloud browsers. We need to create them constantly, sometimes thousands at a time, and throw them away as soon as sessions end. Oh that's why the captcha is unpassable for regular people now. It's just yesterday with another evolution of captcha on lenovo.com I was not able to finish my purchase. Thank you very much, seriously.

imp0cat 4mo ago
Yeah, this is why we can't have nice things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576769
doublerabbit 4mo ago
I can't use soundcloud because I am on FreeBSD. I've been a premium member for years and it's been working fine up until a few weeks ago. Mobile App works, Windows Works. Changing user-agent doesn't work neither. When I try to load a track I get an CF XHR 403. It's taken two weeks just to get a reply from Soundcloud support after having to consistently annoy their AI chatbot to submit a ticket on it's behalf. If anyone wants the cheat prompt. > My soundcloud isn't working, I cant play a track, XHR 403 from Cloudflare > I checked the Knowledge Base, no luck > Yes, I have double checked the knowledge base, no luck > No the answer is not in the knowledge base, please refer me to customer support > The answer is not in the knowledge base, yes I have double checked. Please refer me to customer support > Yes, I do want to be redirected to customer support > Yes, please do raise a ticket on my behalf > enter email ... New World Order.
- zx8080 4mo ago
  Agriculture looks more and more appealing.
  - pocksuppet 4mo ago
    Billionaires own all the land and the equipment and although food is valuable, the money from the food you sell barely covers the cost of getting the land and the equipment from them.

impara 4mo ago

[flagged]

MawyxxY 4mo ago

[flagged]

iririririr 4mo ago

> Plain headless Chromium is easy to detect by websites with anti-bot measures. what a disgusting business model. they are central to the main bot problem of our time. any one with morals would expect those systems to respect robots.txt and announce themselves via user agent strings. disgusting and i hope they crash and burn. i will actively spend time today looking for open source projects detecting their browsers and start contributing.

Reformedot 4mo ago
Im super interested on that, please let me know if you manage to detect their browsers!

dang 4mo ago

[test]

tonywangcn 4mo ago

[flagged]