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

browser-use.com

51–60 of 251 posts

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

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Its unethical because you're intentionally bypassing restrictions. Just because others do it doesn't mean its okay. If you saw a sign in a store that said "1 per person" or "for registered guests only", would you ignore it?

You're confusing law with ethics, they are not the same.

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

#53
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…

Antibot measure also block real users at the slightest change they don't like. Anti-fingerprinting measure? You're a bot. Adblockers? You're a bot.

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

#54

The Internet is drowning in bots, everyone who hosts a site or service is paying the price. At least we have companies like this to make the problem worse.

You have to be a bit more restrictive today yes, but if you weren't already overrun with bots and hacking attempts while hosting a public service many years ago, you probably weren't hosting a even medium-popular website in the first place. Same thing goes today. Slap a rate limit on it and be done with it.

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

#55
have you tried running android browsers ? we run RL workloads using android browsers. We are having to maintain a fork of https://github.com/budtmo/docker-android/ and android chrome on top. We would rather use browser-use if it had that support.

P.S. we do maintain our fork of a browser for rubric computation...but that is not relevant for this. The infrastructure is what we are looking for.

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

#56

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…

Assuming CRIU can checkpoint and restore Chrome, and especially recent versions of Chrome, just fine, is a little bit of stretch.

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

#57
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…

There's no ethical consumption of... ad supported content.

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

#59
post #13

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

So I've been playing and tweaking for a while with running different browsers in containers. And it took a long while to get working well, but it's doable.

The only issue is scaling, the containers aren't super quick to start (so we keep a spare container ready) and there's plenty of other issues. Also docker isn't really a security boundary so there's issues and concerns there.

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

#60

The Internet is drowning in bots, everyone who hosts a site or service is paying the price. At least we have companies like this to make the problem worse.

You have to be a bit more restrictive today yes, but if you weren't already overrun with bots and hacking attempts while hosting a public service many years ago, you probably weren't hosting a even medium-popular website in the first place. Same thing goes today. Slap a rate limit on it and be done with it.

Yes, externalize the expense of dealing with it to each operator.
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