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Products that do what Which is faster? Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium does
Hey Everyone, I just ran a [rather silly] race between Puppeteer (JS), Playwright (Python) and Selenium (Python) to see which one would be fastest on a simple scrape (using Google Colab so you can also run it) Far from a comprehensive benchmark, this race is 100% free from advanced configurations, multi-threading or anything complicated. It just opens Wallapop (a second hand marketplace in Spain) and times how long it takes to extract the first 2000 results of a search. If you like this simple format, have any ideas on how to improve a race like this or have a strong urge to prove Ward…
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We've been trying to evaluate web scraping companies, but when you look at their benchmarks, you can't verify anything, and they mostly exist to prove the company is successful. They put somewhere between 98% and 100% because they pick their own urls, define success their own way, and don't publish the harness. We also saw companies like scrapfly astroturf websites like scrapeway and call them independent. So, we built an open source benchmark that we want to represent the frontier of web data. We're trying to look across all major anti-bot providers and industries, to build a comprehensive…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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2017 · github.com
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Hi HN, I’d like to share an open-source project we’ve been working on for a while: Browser4. The motivation came from a recurring frustration: most browser automation tools (Playwright, Selenium, Puppeteer) are excellent for human-written scripts, but start to show friction when used as a core execution layer for AI agents or at very high concurrency. So instead of building “another wrapper around Playwright”, we experimented with a different direction: designing a browser engine where AI agents are first-class citizens. ### What Browser4 is Browser4 is a browser automation engine built on…
Dec 2025 · github.com
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Hi! According to my benchmark tests I've just built the fastest free-text search engine in the world [0]. However, providing proof of that as well as making people care has proven to be a near impossible task. I could use some help from fellow programmers to both work on the formal proof but also to test this code against the Big5's offerings of full-text search. Would you care to go fetch an amount of common crawl data to test the abilities of ResinDB? If not, then do you perhaps have another strategy to convince people when you have invented something big? Is writing papers and formally…
2017
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I found a serious bottleneck in Python binding of Wasmer and Wasmtime and I found a trick to make 25x faster. Then beat all that using NumPy.
2023 · medium.com
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Hi HN, We’ve all accepted the "Python tax"—you trade execution speed for developer happiness. But what if that trade-off was a thing of the past? I just came across BustAPI, and it’s basically a "cheat code" for Python web services. It’s not just another wrapper; it’s a hybrid engine that embeds a Rust (Actix-Web) core directly into the Python runtime. Is this the end of the "slow Python" era? The benchmarks are pretty shocking. I’d love to see someone stress-test this against a production-grade Go or Node.js setup. Repo: https://github.com/GrandpaEJ/BustAPI Benchmarks:…
Dec 2025 · github.com
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Hi everyone, I'm working for a startup called BugFree Software and would love to hear your feedback on a new product we are launching today. Helium is a library that wraps around Selenium to simplify web automation. It does away with many of the technicalities involved with web scripting. For example: Here is a Selenium script. Can you guess what it does? >>> ff = Firefox() ... >>> text_area = ff.find_element_by_id("u_0_1q") >>> text_area.send_keys("Hello World!") >>> button = ff.find_element_by_class_name("_42g-") >>> button.click() Here is the same script rewritten using Helium: >>>…
2013 · heliumhq.com
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There is a growing number of companies offering anti-bot protection SaaS to protect websites from scraping by automated bots based on Puppeteer/Selenium. Most of them rely on browser properties such as headers, javascript properties (window., navigator.), behavior analysis, to build device/user fingerprints and match it against a database of "whitelisted" fingerprints (typical user behavior/settings/device props etc). For the past few months, together with two other devs I have worked on a customized Puppeteer/Playwright scraping backend. It's essentially a drop-in…
2021
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Recently, I saw few Python accelerators getting a lot of attention, and I thought it would be a good time to finally present the project that we will make available to test in the upcoming days. Flyable is an ahead-of-time compiler that takes your Python code, analyses it, and outputs very optimized machine code. Micro-benchmarks show that it produces programs that run between 10-70x time faster than Python. Flyable is certainly one of the fastest and easiest ways to accelerate your Python code. It finally allows Python to compete in the ring of fast and efficient languages without having to…
2020
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actually, nothing special about this implementation. just another event loop written in rust for educational purposes and joy in tests it shows seamless migration from uvloop for my scraping framework https://github.com/BitingSnakes/silkworm with APIs (fastapi) it shows only one advantage: better p99, uvloop is faster about 10-20% in the synthetic run currently, i am forking on the win branch to give it windows support that uvloop lacks
Mar 2026 · github.com
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The Problem I’ve been using BeautifulSoup for sometime. It’s the standard for ease-of-use in Python scraping, but it almost always becomes the performance bottleneck when processing large-scale datasets. Parsing complex or massive HTML trees in Python typically suffers from high memory allocation costs and the overhead of the Python object model during tree traversal. In my production scraping workloads, the parser was consuming more CPU cycles than the network I/O. Lxml is fast but again uses up a lot of memory when processing large documents and has can cause trouble with malformed…
Apr 2026
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Hi HackerNews, It’s Etienne CTO of dev-tools.ai. We are launching our product today and wanted to share because we think it might help folks here. Do you ever have broken selectors in your UI tests? Are you tired of maintaining them? We have thought about this issue and come up with a solution. We have created a Python SDK for Selenium that allows you to visually identify elements (using machine learning under the hood). Since our technology uses the visual appearance of elements and ML, it is more resilient than XPaths or pixel perfect match and should help you get rid of broken selectors.…
2022 · dev-tools.ai
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TLDR: I'm learning Go and [this](https://github.com/ItzaMi/compare-supermarket-prices) is my first project with it. What am I doing wrong and what could I improve? In an attempt to expand my horizons and actually get into backend development, I've decided to learn Go. I picked it for no reason other than the market seems to be in a friendly state towards it, compared to Elixir, but I'm very much enjoying it. Thankfully something unlocked in my brain and I thought of a project to do while learning the syntax and how the language works, so I've built a scraper. Here's the…
2024
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Hi HN, Antonio here. Founder of Seltz. Seltz is a web search API built for AI agents. We wrote the crawler, the index, and the retrieval models ourselves, in Rust, by a team that's spent years building web search at scale. In our tests, queries come back in under 200ms. Efficiency was the first design principle. Search sits on the critical path: agents can't generate their first tokens or kick off the next tool call until results come back. When you run tens or hundreds of queries in parallel, every millisecond of tail latency compounds. Most search APIs for agents are wrappers around Google…
Apr 2026 · console.seltz.ai
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Hey HN! I have been working on Ant for a while now, would love to share around now. What is Ant? It's my JavaScript runtime, built from scratch over many hours of work. Much effort has gone into keeping the binary size small, around 9MB at the moment (6.5 MB with -Os). On my M4 Pro, the hono coldstart bench (examples/npm/hono/bench-coldstart.js) lands around 5ms, about 2.4x faster than bun, and 5.8x faster than node. To keep things small, the engine ("Ant Silver") is hand-written, not a wrapper around V8/JSC/SpiderMonkey. The JIT is still a work in progress but it…
May 2026 · github.com
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Hey everyone! I am excited to share updates on four of my & my teams' open-source projects that take large-scale search systems to the next level: USearch, UForm, UCall, and StringZilla. These projects are designed to work seamlessly together, end-to-end—covering everything from indexing and AI to storage and networking. And yeah, they're optimized for x86 AVX2/512 and Arm NEON/SVE hardware. USearch [1]: Think of it as Meta FAISS on steroids. It's now quicker, supports clustering of any granularity, and offers multi-index lookups. Plus, it's got more native bindings than probably…
2023 · usearch-images.com
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