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Comment by novaleaf | Hacker News Reader

I am using the new headless Chrome for my Browser-Automation SaaS (PhantomJsCloud.com) and it is working great.

It fixes some nagging compatibilities with certain websites. I don't bother with anti-bot mitigations, and I don't expect this to be useful in that regard. commercial Anti-Bot doesn't care about how much you spoof your browser fingerprint.

feel free to AMA

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I just realized that I use your service to get pool monitoring data.

I configured everything (login & scraping) and start fetching data using your serivce. Then I discoverd that you have to login to load the dashboard but the their get API only requires the serial number to fetch the data .

If you want to get billing details automatically (without logging in) just inspect the Http Response sent back with every api request. it says how many credits are remaining, the api cost, etc.

Does phantomjscloud still run phantomjs? How do you keep it up to date with security patches? Have you benchmarked how this new chrome performs against the old headless chrome and against phantomjs?

No, running on Chrome now. I'm stuck with the unfortunate name. Chrome is much faster and well behaved than PhantomJs ever was. I offered PhantomJs as an option until not long ago, but nobody was using it.

Can you share the code for how to launch a new headless chrome?

If you are using Puppeteer, it's easy, just add "headless":"new" as described here: https://pptr.dev/guides/chrome-extensions

fyi, The new version just helps with compatibility, I have not seen it impact anti-bot detection at all.

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