Obscura
Obscura is a headless browser written in Rust, built for AI agents and web scraping. It runs JavaScript with the V8 engine without bundling Chromium, speaks Chrome's control protocol (CDP) so it plugs in place of Chrome in Puppeteer or Playwright, and ships a built-in MCP server (navigate, page snapshot, screenshot, PDF, click, script evaluation). Apache 2.0 license. A paid cloud offer sits beside it (waitlist), and the repository promises the open engine will never be feature-gated.
Strengths
- No Chromium or Node.js to install: a binary, a Docker image, or a Cargo build
- Speaks CDP, so it slots in place of Chrome in Puppeteer or Playwright without rewriting your scripts
- Built-in MCP server: an agent can navigate, snapshot, click and evaluate script directly
Limitations
- Independent engine, not Chromium: rare CSS, some web APIs, media and fonts may differ, and the repository admits it
- Speed and memory figures are the repository's own, no independent measurement repeated here
- The paid cloud offer lives beside the free engine: read what stays free before building on it
Best for
- Developers having an agent read or collect simple pages who want a lighter environment
- Teams that already have Puppeteer or Playwright scripts and want to try a lighter engine without rewriting them