Glossary
Browserless collection
Collecting from a site's own list endpoint over plain HTTP, with no browser running at all — fast, cheap, and only possible where the data is structured.
Also called: browserless scraping, HTTP scraping, no-browser scraping.
Browserless collection asks a site for its data the way the site's own front end does: a plain HTTP request to the endpoint that returns the list, and a reply that is already structured. Nothing renders, no scripts run, and no engine is started. It is the fastest way to collect by a wide margin — seconds where a driven browser takes minutes — because almost everything a browser spends its time on is work you did not need.
What makes it detectable is not the absence of a window but the shape of the request. A default HTTP client announces itself before the first byte of the reply: its TLS handshake is not a browser's, its header order is not a browser's, and both are measured outside the page entirely, which is why a TLS fingerprint is the thing to get right here rather than a user-agent string. Argus's collectors impersonate a real browser's handshake and header set, and go out through the profile's own proxy, so the request is ordinary on both counts.
The limit is the honest one: it only works where a structured endpoint exists. When the data is only in rendered HTML, or the job operates an account you own, a real browser session is the answer instead. Argus draws the line as two tools rather than one — prebuilt collectors for the named services that have an endpoint, and automations driving a real profile for everything else.
More from the glossary
CAPTCHA solving
Passing a challenge to a third-party service that answers it. Useful occasionally, and a poor substitute for not triggering the challenge.
Timezone and geolocation spoofing
Making a browser report a clock — and sometimes a position — that matches where the session claims to be rather than where the machine is.
Anti-detect browser
A browser built to run many separate identities on one machine, each with its own storage, device characteristics and network address.
Browser fingerprint
The set of properties a page can read about your browser and machine in a few milliseconds, without permission, which together identify the device.
Canvas fingerprint
An identifier derived by asking the browser to draw a shape or a line of text and hashing the exact pixels that come back.
WebGL fingerprint
An identifier built from the graphics hardware a page can see through WebGL — the reported vendor and renderer strings, plus the pixels a 3D scene produces.
Every entry is listed on the glossary index.