Previously on HN: Detecting Noise in Canvas Fingerprinting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170079

The reception was not really positive for the obvious reason at that time.

Checking https://issues.chromium.org/issues/340836884, I’m mildly surprised to find the report just under a year old, with no attention at all (bar a me-too comment after four months), despite having been filed with priority P1, which I understand is supposed to mean “aim to fix it within 30 days”. If it continues to get no attention, I’m curious if it’ll get bumped automatically in five days’ time when it hits one year, given that they do something like that with P2 and P3 bugs, shifting status to Available or something, can’t quite remember.

I say only “mildly”, because my experience on Chromium bugs (ones I’ve filed myself, or ones I’ve encountered that others have filed) has never been very good. I’ve found Firefox much better about fixing bugs.

> The call to page.evaluate just hangs, and the browser dies silently. browser.close() is never reached, which can cause memory leaks over time.

Not just memory leaks. Since a couple months ago, if you use Chrome via playwright etc. on macOS, it will deposit a copy of Chrome (more than 1GB) into /private/var/folders/kd/<...>/X/com.google.Chrome.code_sign_clone/, and if you exit without a clean browser.close(), the copy of Chrome will remain there. I noticed after it ate up ~50GB in two days. No idea what's the point of this code sign clone thing, but I had to add --disable-features=MacAppCodeSignClone to all my invocations to prevent it, which is super annoying.

Relevant plug: At Herd we offer a browser automation and orchestration framework that uses real browsers and thus sidesteps several of these issues[0]. The API is puppeteer-like but doesn't use it as we built the entire framework[1] from scratch.

If you're wondering about the emphasis on MCPs, Herd is a generalist automation framework with a bespoke package format – trails[2], that supports MCP and REST out-of-the-box.

0: https://herd.garden

1: https://herd.garden/docs/reference

2: https://herd.garden/docs/trails-automations

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EDIT: I understand not everyone likes a shameless plug in another thread. The intention behind it however is also informative, as not every browser automation strategy is subject to the issues as in TFA.

The title does say crashing Chromium bots, yet our approach creates "Chromium bots" that do not crash under this premise, providing a useful counter-example.