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Comment by yencabulator | Hacker News Reader

Why a new browser extension for Chrome instead of an MCP operating Chrome over Chrome DevTools Protocol?

https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/

Not vouching for this project, but just an example of the category existing: https://github.com/AgentDeskAI/browser-tools-mcp

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CDP is great for testing. But one of the most basic checks for bot detection is checking for CDP(webdriver). Its always going to be a cat and mouse game. You'll see a bunch of solutions captch solvers etc, But they usually are only good for a few weeks.

There's no reason why the same cat and mouse game wouldn't apply to this browser as a whole.

True, but its orders of magnitude lesser when webdriver flag is an extremely basic bot check that is now considered 101.

It sounds like you're thinking of window.navigator.webdriver, which is a WebDriver thing not part of Chrome DevTools Protocol. With CDP, as far as I can tell the detection mechanisms are more about the heuristics of e.g. how fast a form is filled -- which this AI stuff will trigger immediately too.

(And even if CDP had an explicit marker somewhere, surely patching that out is easier than piling up enough patches to "make a new browser".)

Dont you need to navigator.webdriver === true for CDP to drive automation? Maybe I need to update my understanding on this. THis is usually a dead giveaway

I see mentions that (unpatched) webdriver is easy to detect but detecting CDP only works by heuristics on timing etc.

With stuff like https://www.cloudflare.com/en-in/application-services/produc... and https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/ big money going on both sides last thing you want is to shadow detected as a bot. Its all ok if you are scraping to top rated SEO slop which is usually static sites but for anything beyond it wont work well eventually. Quite a few issues on browerbase, crawl4ai and similar repos around being detected as a bot.

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