Why Headless Scraping Fails and Headful Playwright Doesn't
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- @levelsio
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✨ Okay with lots of help from @javilopen and his Spanish scraping friends I've managed to vibe code my own @Scrapingbee alternative and replace my $249/mo Scrapingbee plan with my own $1/mo scraper running on my VPS! First I tried OpenSERP, an open source project that seems freshly maintained but it didn't work on my VPS IP or laptop IP and got blocked fast Then I tried to use residential IP proxies from IPRoyal but they were already quite tainted IPs meaning Google already knew they were scrapers and just blocked about 60% of them already, not so great, also didn't work! Then I discovered OpenSERP uses a vanilla headless Chrome, Google instantly detects that and blocks that, so literally the entire repo is useless cause it won't even work? I don't get why they don't say that in the docs? OpenSERP is even worse than just basic CURL, as my AI said: "plain curl got 7% blocked but OpenSERP's headless browser got 100% blocked" So then I just built my own with Playwright and a real Google Chrome on my VPS, headful and persistent context, and slow pacing like every 30 seconds or so And I got some better residential IP recommendations (which I can't tell you because thenhey t stop…
- context window — The maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.
- AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
A tested comparison of anti-detection scraping approaches, headless Chrome and generic residential proxies both got blocked while a headful Playwright instance with persistent reached ~90% success, useful for anyone building scraping into an pipeline.
“plain curl got 7% blocked but OpenSERP's headless browser got 100% blocked”
“OpenSERP is even worse than just basic CURL, as my AI said”
“Now I'm at about 90% success rate, which is similar or better than Scrapingbee”
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