Browserless

Articles by

Joel Griffith

Founder of Browserless

After abandoning his career as a professional trumpet player, Joel built technologies in the creative ad-tech industries. The challenges frequently required headless browsers, which lead him to build Browserless.

July 18, 2024

How to Run Puppeteer Within Chrome to Create Hybrid Automations

If you’re finding it hard to automate browser tasks due to security challenges, learn how to nest browsers for powerful hybrid automations in this guide.

July 16, 2024

Hiring - Senior Product Engineer

We're now hiring a a Senior Product Engineer to join our team.

July 11, 2024

Why HTTP load tests fail to catch critical errors

Why your load tests should include browsers as well as API call, and how to handle the required infrastructure.

May 29, 2024

How to Fix Slow Puppeteer Scripts With Three Underused Techniques

Common issues that cause slow Puppeteer scripts and how to fix them with underused features.

March 22, 2024

How to run Playwright on Netlify

How to deploy Playwright on Netlify for testing or other automations, including advice on hosting headless browsers.

March 21, 2024

Stream login windows during Puppeteer scripts, with our Hybrid Automations

Screencast to an iframe while running a Puppeteer script, for actions such as entering details, solving captchas or authorizing a 2FA.

February 28, 2024

How to use our new and improved SDK for Browserless v2

Diving into what's possible with Browserless's updated SDK and how to use it. Extend, modify or even re-implement parts of Browserless.

February 21, 2024

How and why we ripped our OS product apart for a full rebuild

Our battle with tech debt and the full details of completely rebuilding an open source product for v2.

February 2, 2024

Interview with Ben Fellows: Life Running a Top Quality Assurance Agency

Discussing the ins and outs of running a QA agency, including the realist's approach to continuous delivery and testing with Playwright.

December 20, 2023

Case Study: How Takeoff Copenhagen got a 5x speed boost and reliable proxies for scraping with Browserless

Read how switching to Browserless helped Takeoff get reliable proxies, cut their bill and run faster scraping scripts.

December 6, 2023

browserless 2.0.0

We’re more than excited to announce today that we’ve rewritten browserless.io from the ground-up, and will be releasing it soon!

December 5, 2023

Advanced issues when managing Chrome on AWS

Key points to consider when hosting headless Chromium on AWS, for both EC2 and Lambda deployments

September 24, 2023

Announcing a residential proxy for browserless.io

We're excited to announce that we now have a built-in residential proxy for our paid cloud plans on browserless!

July 18, 2023

Browserless now runs in LangChain

We’ve begun the process of integrating Browserless with the popular LangChain AI library, starting with Browserless’ REST APIs.

June 14, 2023

Using browserless to train your LLM

Large language models are only as good as the data you ingest into them. Read more about browserless and how to us it to train your LLMs!

March 21, 2023

How to use Puppeteer on Vercel

Using puppeteer on Vercel is hard! Here we dive into how to do it with the power of browserless

March 13, 2023

Announcing a new puppeteer benchmarking tool

Announcing a new puppeteer benchmarking tool to see how puppeteer performs version over version.

February 23, 2023

Scaling Puppeteer and Chrome Horizontally

This guide includes all the snippets you need to succeed at scaling puppeteer and chrome horizontally by using tools like nginx and docker.

February 2, 2023

Why we pick Puppeteer over Selenium almost every time

Choosing between Selenium and puppeteer can be hard, here's some suggestions of what we've found over the past several years to help.

March 10, 2021

🎉 Announcing the new Puppeteer debugging site!

Without a doubt, one of the most helpful tools when working with any browser automation library is a visual debugger. We've written quite a bit about it.

February 7, 2021

Amsterdam Data Center is now generally available

We're proud to announce that we have a new data center setup in Amsterdam! With the recent exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union, we've heard from a lot our users about having a location that's still located in the EU for legal purposes.

January 21, 2021

Account features for 2021

One of the things we've heard often is that our Worker settings is confusing, and today we rectify that by removing a slew of unnecessary information, and adding three simple buttons: Force Restart, Relaunch, and Settings.

January 4, 2021

Headless Handbook Chapter 1: Introduction to browser automation

This is the first of seven chapters in an ongoing blog series on headless browsers and best practices.

December 15, 2020

New stealth mode in browserless.io

We're happy to announce that, as of version 1.42.0 of our docker image, we've added support for launching chromium in "stealth" mode. Using stealth mode is as simple as adding a stealth argument to your launch args.

September 30, 2020

How to fix Puppeteer font issues

If you've been printing PDF's in puppeteer for some time, you've no doubt encountered issues where fonts don't render properly. Blotchy, pixelated, or even plain incorrect renderings are common when using headless-browsers. Luckily, there's a few quick things you can do to fix the problem!

September 2, 2020

Hunting White Whales: JavaScript Memory leaks

It's what every Node developer fears: the process that keeps eating memory and won't stop, that's right we're talking about memory leaks today folks, and more specifically the NodeJS kind. This post shares is how we found, diagnosed, and fixed a particular memory leak that caused us some headaches in browserless.

June 9, 2020

How to screencast with just Puppeteer

Having recently rewritten our implementation of screencasting for Puppeteer, we decided that the implementation was interesting enough to go over in a blog post. We'll of course go over how we landed on the decision, and talk more about tradeoffs made for our particular API.

October 17, 2019

Pricing updates for January 1st, 2020

Effective January 1st, 2020 we'll be updating our prices. Learn more about the new rates and how they will impact you.

August 22, 2019

The small things that will kill your indie business

Today, I wanted to take a look at the darker side of running a business, mostly the small things that will absolutely kill it. My intent here is to shed light on symptoms so you can course-correct before they become and out of control problem.

May 3, 2019

Improving Puppeteer Performance

Today, I'd like to go over how browserless can help you mitigate some of these slower operations, and in certain cases even cut your loading time in half.

April 18, 2019

Painless Puppeteer Debugging

Puppeteer can be frustrating and time-consuming it can be to debug, that's we're happy to announce our new Live Debugger.

April 1, 2019

Usage-based accounts are live!

We're happy to announce that usage-based accounts on browserless are now live! Similar to our dedicated accounts, usage-based accounts come with all the API's that you now expect from the browserless service with the convenience of only paying for what you use.

March 13, 2019

Observations running more than 5 million headless sessions a week

At the time of this writing, we currently run nearly 5 million headless sessions a week. Given all of this growth and time passed, it's time once again for us to divulge what we've learned running a headless browser company at scale.

February 6, 2019

Sanely debugging puppeteer and fixes to common issues

It's my hope that, at the end of this post, you'll have much better tools and methods for debugging some of the tougher problems in headless Chrome. And if not you'll at least know where to get started!

January 7, 2019

Phantom pain: the first year running headless Chrome in production

Browserless has just recently had its first birthday! Though there is so much to write about, today I want to go over the core of what browserless does and pass on all of our biggest findings, whether you're just beginning your headless Chrome journey or have been doing so for a while.

August 8, 2018

New globally available workers!

We're happy to announce that you can now launch browserless instances across the globe! With this comes two new load-balancers that can better handle routing your traffic as well. No matter where you are you'll be closer to your browserless workers.

August 1, 2018

Things they don't teach you running a business by yourself

One of the most hotly talked about topics in tech right now is starting an indie business. As the sole-developer, founder, and doer of all things at browserless; I wanted to take chance and paint a better picture of what's like to be independent in the technology world.

June 4, 2018

Observations running 2 million headless browser sessions

We're excited to announce that we've recently just crossed over 2 million sessions served! We'd like to take some time and outline common best practices when running headless browsers (and puppeteer) in a production environment.

May 26, 2018

Browserless functions and usage-based accounts!

We're extremely excited to announce that we'll soon be entering a closed-beta for browserless functions and a new payment option: usage-based payment!

April 25, 2018

Running Chrome Headless on Linux

You've written your Puppeteer code, you've made sure it works, and now it's time to get your project running someplace. This might be on a hosting provider like Amazon Web Services or on your own hardware. In any case chances are that you're running some flavor of Linux, and if you're reading this then you've undoubtedly run into some issues getting Chrome to run properly.

February 22, 2018

Handling large images in puppeteer

Puppeteer has the ability to take screenshots of a website, but it comes with some size limitations. The solution is pretty easy and we share it here.