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

browser-use.com

31–40 of 251 posts

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

#31
post #16
post #13

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

docker is not a security boundary but a resource boundary.

It is security boundary but a weak one. Escaping from docker is very hard.

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

#32

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

They have IMO: 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.

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

#33

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

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

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

#34
post #9

> 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 an…

> 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. Unethical just because it does something someone else doesn't want? I guess it depends on why and what the intention is. I don't have time to sit 24/7 in front of a computer to get a ticket to some events, does that mean it's unethical for me to use my own bot so I c…

> even if others don't think that thing should be automated

It's an interesting thought that can be further explored. Could anything that's considered "unwanted" by a third party considered unethical, if I do it anyway?

If the hotel self-service restaurant has a sign "don't take the food out" and I take 1 apple in my pocket for a snack, is it unethical? Or maybe the sign is just for people that would otherwise take $100 of watermelons out of the cantina daily and try to resell it on the beach.

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

#36
post #9

> 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 an…

I briefly tried to do his job where it was scraping steam for CS GO skins (think a knife skin for $2,000.00) and yeah trying to find proxy poviders/get around the ip limit... tough one but market for it people paying for the tool (not mine).

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

#37

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

Our browsers beat competitors in performance too. Chrome uses mainly CPU, not GPU

We support GPU via software tho

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

#38
post #9

> 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 an…

> 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. Unethical just because it does something someone else doesn't want? I guess it depends on why and what the intention is. I don't have time to sit 24/7 in front of a computer to get a ticket to some events, does that mean it's unethical for me to use my own bot so I c…

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.

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

#40
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.

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