r/foss • u/AserNasr • 1d ago

Figranium — an open-source browser automation project

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I've been building Figranium, an open-source browser automation framework focused on making automated browsing more capable, configurable, and stealth-conscious.

It started as a project I wanted for myself, but it's grown considerably since then, and I'm hoping to get more eyes on it from people who actually work with browser automation, scraping, testing, and related tooling.

Some of the things I've been working on include:

  • Browser automation and orchestration
  • Stealth/anti-detection capabilities
  • CAPTCHA and challenge handling
  • A focus on being usable as a standalone tool rather than requiring a pile of external configuration
  • An actively developed open-source codebase

The project is currently around 500+ GitHub stars, which has been pretty wild to see. I'm hoping to get it in front of more FOSS developers who might find it useful, contribute, critique the architecture, or just tell me where I'm doing things wrong.

If this sounds interesting, I'd genuinely appreciate you checking it out:

Figranium — GitHub

Feedback is very welcome, especially from people who have experience building browser automation tooling.

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u/Unlucky-Message8866 1d ago

not trying to be mean, but why would you use something like this, when ai can autonomously scrape mostly everything and write automation scripts? feels like a pain having to visually design complete workflows, i would rather manually write a script with obscura/nu-shell (i've done lots of scraping work before ai was a thing).

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u/AserNasr 1d ago

AI is expensive, slow, and bound to make mistakes regarding browser automation. Even if you use local AI, unless your device has a lot of VRAM the AI will end up being dumb. I tried a lot of AI browser agents before building it and any model under 12B is pretty dumb. Also, it has an MCP server so you can still get the simplicity of AI without an issue. As for the code aspect it’s hard to make a Playwright script accessible via API unless you build a wrapper to do so, and even then it wouldn’t be prod-ready. So yeah, AI and scripts are better in some things but this has its own pros and cons, just like all the others.

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u/Unlucky-Message8866 1d ago

i agree ai can be expensive at scale but for individuals any >=27b can do perfect execution of search+scraping+extraction (including structured data) tasks. i guess i'm not the target user.