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

Post by mhuffman » Wed, Sep 18, 2024, 7:56 PM UTC

_boffin_ wrote: post #70

mhuffman wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interesting if you can find it.

https://antoinevastel.com

Post by xnyan » Wed, Sep 18, 2024, 9:45 PM UTC

sahmeepee wrote: post #51

jasonwcfan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 difficu…

Sounds like a prooblem that can be solved with a Playwright script with a bit of error checking in it. I think this needs more elaboration on what the Finic wrapper is adding to stock Playwright that can't just be achieved through more effective use of stock Playwright.

Post by mdaniel » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 4:36 PM UTC

xnyan wrote: post #72

mdaniel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this specific scenario, where the project is using *automated Chrome* to even bother with the connection, redirects, and bazillions of other "browser-y" things to arrive at HTML to be parsed, the very idea that one would `soup = BeautifulSoup(playright.content())` is crazypants to me I am open to the fact that html5lib strives to parse correctly, and good for them, but that would be the case where one wished to us…

I think there's some misunderstanding? Sometimes parsing HTML is the best way to get what you need, however there are many situations where one must use something like playwright to get the HTML in the first place (for example, the html is generated clientside by javascript). What's the better alternative?

  chrome.exe --dump-html https://example.com/lol \
    | python -c "import bs4; print('reevaluate life choices that led you here')"

Post by mdaniel » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 4:47 PM UTC

suriya-ganesh wrote: post #43

I've been working on browser agent the last week[1]. So this is very exciting. There are also browser agent implementations like Skyvern[2] (Also YC backed) ,or Tarsier[3] Seems like, finic is providing a way to scale/schedule these agents? If that's the case what's the advantage over something like airflow or windmill ? If I remember correctly, Skyvern also has an implementation of scaling these browser tasks built…

Post by ayanb9440 » Thu, Sep 19, 2024, 8:43 PM UTC

mdaniel wrote: post #76

suriya-ganesh wrote: post #43

I've been working on browser agent the last week[1]. So this is very exciting. There are also browser agent implementations like Skyvern[2] (Also YC backed) ,or Tarsier[3] Seems like, finic is providing a way to scale/schedule these agents? If that's the case what's the advantage over something like airflow or windmill ? If I remember correctly, Skyvern also has an implementation of scaling these browser tasks built…

https://github.com/reworkd/tarsier/pull/115/files represents someone who does not know what git is used for Cloning into 'tarsier'... remote: Enumerating objects: 15238, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (1613/1613), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (929/929), done. Receiving objects: 100% (15238/15238), 3.01 GiB | 14.82 MiB/s, done.