Glossary
Headless browser
A real browser engine run without a visible window, usually under automation. Cheap to run at volume, and increasingly easy for a site to spot.
A headless browser is a browser engine running with no visible interface, driven by a script over an automation protocol. It is the standard tool for testing and for collection at volume, because a machine can run many of them and none of them needs a screen. The engine is real, so scripts execute and the DOM is built — the difference is that nothing is drawn for a person to look at.
The operational problem is that headless mode has always been distinguishable, and the differences are exactly the ones a fingerprint measures: what the graphics stack produces, which fonts resolve, how the window reports its own size, and what the automation protocol leaves visible. Sites that care check. Argus takes the other route — sessions are ordinary Chromium sessions with a window, so the page you collect is the page a person would have seen, with the identity generated in the renderer rather than concealed by a wrapper. That is the argument on the scraping page, and the automations that drive those sessions are documented on the automation page.
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.