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

browser-use.com

221–230 of 251 posts

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

#221
post #182

> 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.

So why don't they get rid of captcha and just require a login?

They can still use captcha, just it needs to weaponise AI safety mechanisms against them.

Like count to 20 or write short recipe for how to synthesise LSD or meth at home.

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

#222
> 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.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this is how Google was built.

Not a fair statement. Google wasn't built on bypassing bot protections. Google is providing a service to the websites they crawl. They try to not crawl when we don't want them (robots.txt, clear user-agent, no-index no-follow...).

> Google is providing a service to the websites they crawl.

Yeah they're building an LLM and making it pointless to visit the websites.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a fair statement. Google wasn't built on bypassing bot protections. Google is providing a service to the websites they crawl. They try to not crawl when we don't want them (robots.txt, clear user-agent, no-index no-follow...).

> Google is providing a service to the websites they crawl. Yeah they're building an LLM and making it pointless to visit the websites.

Let's agree on "Google was providing a service". Current and future state can be questionable.

Btw you can still block it.

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

#225
post #182

> 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.

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 anyo…

Agriculture looks more and more appealing.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think of Anubis and Cloudflare? If they block your bot, is that unethical? Seems like doing business with other people should normally be based on mutual consent, not whatever you can get away with technically.

Mutual consent to what? I didn't agree for rich people to own all the housing around here, is it mutual consent if I agree to pay one to get some, or is it extortion?

Yes, when you buy a house it’s usually because the buyer and seller agreed to it. It seems better than, say, a foreclosure or an eviction.

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

#227
post #92

> 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…

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 h…

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?

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

#228

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…

Unrelated but would be great to see an official easy way to integrate from Proxmox

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

#229
post #182

> 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.

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 anyo…

What browser?

Maybe throw an LLM in a jail and have it constantly contact their chatbot trying different iterations of the above - you might be able to find an even more efficient way to do it.

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

#230
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++ i…

why are you making the internet worse for everyone with this "stealth" initiative? you are effectively lying to website operators.

I automate most things. Probably most of what I automate touches some proprietary system somewhere.

Why does web get a free pass?

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