obscura-node

obscura-node is an open-source Node.js wrapper for Obscura, a high-performance headless browser written from scratch in Rust. It has reached over 1,800+ downloads on npm, serving as a lightweight drop-in replacement for headless Chrome with Puppeteer and Playwright.

Unlike heavy Chromium installations that take 300+ MB of disk space and 200+ MB of RAM per tab, Obscura runs in just ~30 MB of memory and starts up in under 50 milliseconds.

Key Highlights

• 1,800+ npm Downloads: Actively downloaded by developers building AI web agents and scraping pipelines.
• Ultra-Lightweight Footprint: Consumes only ~30 MB memory per page, using up to 10x less RAM than headless Chrome.
• Drop-in Chrome Replacement: Full Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) support over WebSockets for seamless Puppeteer and Playwright integration.
• Fast Startup & Rendering: Loads static pages in ~51 ms and dynamic JavaScript apps in ~85 ms.
• Built-in Stealth & Tracker Blocking: Masks automation flags and blocks thousands of analytics trackers out of the box.
• One-Shot Fetch API: Includes ObscuraFetch() to fetch and render any URL into HTML, plain text, or Markdown without setting up a server.

Quick Start

Install via npm

npm install obscura-node

One-Shot Page Fetching

import { ObscuraFetch } from 'obscura-node';

const page = await ObscuraFetch('https://example.com', {
  format: 'markdown',
  stealth: true,
});

console.log(page.content);

Puppeteer / Playwright Integration

import { loadObscura } from 'obscura-node';
import puppeteer from 'puppeteer-core';

// Spawns lightweight browser instance and returns CDP WebSocket
const { wsEndpoint, close } = await loadObscura({ port: 9222 });

const browser = await puppeteer.connect({
  browserWSEndpoint: wsEndpoint,
});

const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');

await browser.close();
await close();

Comparison: Obscura vs Headless Chrome

Tech Stack

• Runtime: Node.js, TypeScript
• Engine: Obscura (Rust V8 via deno_core), Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP)
• Distribution: npm package, cross-platform binary manager (Linux, macOS, Windows)