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Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations

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Re: Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations

#11

Post by jasonwcfan »

computershit wrote: post #9

First, nice work. I'm certainly glad to see such a tool in this space right now. Besides a UI, what does this provide that something like Browserless doesn't?

Thanks! Wasn't familiar with Browserless but took a quick look. It seems they're very focused on the scraping use case. We're more focused on the agent use case. One of our first customers turned us on to this - they wanted to build an RPA automation to push data to a cloud EHR. The problem was it ran as a single page application with no URL routing, and had an extremely complex API for their backend that was difficult to reverse engineer. So automating the browser was the best way to integrate.

If you're trying to build an agent for a long-running job like that, you run into different problems: - Failures are magnified as a workflow has multiple upstream dependencies and most scraping jobs don't. - You have to account for different auth schemes (Oauth, password, magic link, etc) - You have to implement token refresh logic for when sessions expire, unless you want to manually login several times per day

We don't have most of these features yet, but it's where we plan to focus.

And finally, we've licensed Finic under Apache 2.0 whereas Browserless is only available under a commercial license.

Re: Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations

#12

Post by ghxst »

Cool service but how will you deal / how do you plan to deal with anti scraping and anti bot services like Akamai, Arkose, Cloudflare, DataDome etc.? Automation of the web isn't solved by another playwright or puppeteer abstraction, you need to solve more fundemental problems in order to mitigate the issues you run into at scale.

Re: Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations

#13

Post by jasonwcfan »

ghxst wrote: post #12

Cool service but how will you deal / how do you plan to deal with anti scraping and anti bot services like Akamai, Arkose, Cloudflare, DataDome etc.? Automation of the web isn't solved by another playwright or puppeteer abstraction, you need to solve more fundemental problems in order to mitigate the issues you run into at scale.

I mentioned this in another comment, but I know from experience that it's impossible to reliably differentiate bots from humans over a network. And since the right to automate browsers has survived repeated legal challenges, all vendors can do is make it incrementally harder to weed out the low sophistication actors.

This actually creates an evergreen problem that companies need to overcome, and our paid version will probably involve helping companies overcome these barriers.

Also I should clarify that we're explicitly not trying to build a playwright abstraction - we're trying to remain as unopinionated as possible about how developers code the bot, and just help with the network-level infrastructure they'll need to make it reliable and make it scale.

It's good feedback for us, we'll make that point more clear!

Re: Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations

#16

Post by candiddevmike »

jasonwcfan wrote: post #13
ghxst wrote: post #12

Cool service but how will you deal / how do you plan to deal with anti scraping and anti bot services like Akamai, Arkose, Cloudflare, DataDome etc.? Automation of the web isn't solved by another playwright or puppeteer abstraction, you need to solve more fundemental problems in order to mitigate the issues you run into at scale.

I mentioned this in another comment, but I know from experience that it's impossible to reliably differentiate bots from humans over a network. And since the right to automate browsers has survived repeated legal challenges, all vendors can do is make it incrementally harder to weed out the low sophistication actors. This actually creates an evergreen problem that companies need to overcome, and our paid version will…

Don't take this the wrong way, but this is the kind of unethical behavior that our industry should frown upon IMO. I view this kind of thing on the same level as DDoS-as-a-Service companies.

I wish your company the kind of success it deserves.

Re: Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations

#17

Post by skeptrune »

I wonder if there are hidden observality problems with scraping with ideal solutions of a different shape than a dashboard. Feels like sentry connection or other common alert monitoring solutions would combine well with the LLM proposed changes and help trams react more quickly to pipeline problems.

Re: Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations

#18

Post by candiddevmike »

jasonwcfan wrote: post #3
whatnotests2 wrote: post #2

With agents like Finic, soon the web will be built for agents, rather than humans. I can see a few years from now almost all web traffic is agents.

Yep. I used to be the guy responsible for bot detection at Robinhood so I can tell you firsthand it's impossible to reliably differentiate between humans and machines over a network. So either you accept being automated, or you overcorrect and block legitimate users. I don't think the dead internet theory is true today, but I think it will be true soon. IMO that's actually a good thing, more agents representing us on…

That is some bizarre mental gymnastics to justify the work you've done. What about the rest of us who don't want agents representing us?

Re: Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations

#19

Post by ayanb9440 »

slewis wrote: post #15

Is it stateful? Like can I do a run, read the results, and then do another run from that point?

We currently don't save the browser state after the run has completed but that's something we can definitely add as a feature. Could you elaborate on your use case? In which scenarios would it be better to split a run into multiple steps?
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