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CloakBrowser

4 min read

CloakBrowser

🚀 Description

CloakHQ/CloakBrowser — a stealth Chromium that antibot systems score as a normal browser, because it is one. Not a patched config, not a JS injection: a real Chromium binary with fingerprints modified at the C++ source level and compiled in.

The pitch is a drop-in Playwright/Puppeteer replacement — same API, swap the import, “3 lines of code, 30 seconds to unblock”. pip install cloakbrowser or npm install cloakbrowser; the right binary (~200 MB) auto-downloads on first launch. A .NET/C# NuGet client (CloakBrowser) mirrors the Python and JS wrappers.

This is the Chromium counterpart to Camofox Browser (which does the same C++-level stealth on a Firefox fork). CloakBrowser’s headline extras are humanize=True — human mouse curves, per-character typing, realistic scroll — and a 0.9 reCAPTCHA v3 score (human-level, server-verified) on the Pro build.

🧩 Features

  • 58–59 source-level C++ patches — canvas, WebGL, audio, fonts, GPU, screen, WebRTC, network timing, automation signals, CDP input behavior. Compiled into the binary, not injected via JS or set via flags.
  • humanize=True — one flag rewrites all mouse/keyboard/scroll interactions (Bézier curves, typing pauses, occasional typos with self-correction). default and careful presets, per-call human_config overrides.
  • Passes the detectors — reCAPTCHA v3 0.9, Cloudflare Turnstile (non-interactive + managed), FingerprintJS, BrowserScan (4/4), ShieldSquare; navigator.webdriver reports false, UA has no HeadlessChrome leak, TLS ja3n/ja4 matches Chrome. Tested against 30+ detection sites.
  • Stealthy by default — random fingerprint seed per launch; --fingerprint=<seed> for a persistent returning-visitor identity. Linux wrapper spoofs as Windows for a more common fingerprint.
  • Proxy + geoip — HTTP/SOCKS5 proxies, geoip=True matches timezone/locale to the proxy exit IP and spoofs WebRTC ICE candidates.
  • Persistent profiles, Docker image, CDP server mode — launch_persistent_context() keeps cookies/localStorage and enables Widevine DRM; cloakhq/cloakbrowser image runs cloakserve with per-connection fingerprint seeds.

Reasoning for

The anti-bot browsing layer for agentic web automation — same slot as Camofox Browser, Browser Use, and Browser Harness in this vault, but Chromium-native with the Playwright API kept intact. Where Camofox Browser’s kicker is accessibility-tree token savings, CloakBrowser’s is behavioral realism (humanize) and a server-verified reCAPTCHA score. Sits upstream of the data-acquisition thinking in Bright Data / Firecrawl / Scrapling — it’s the headed-but-invisible end where bot walls, not parsing, are the blocker. Ships example integrations for browser-use, Crawl4AI, Crawlee, Scrapling, Stagehand, LangChain, Selenium, and undetected-chromedriver.

Alternatives considered

  • Camofox Browser — the closest sibling: C++-level stealth on Firefox (Camoufox fork) instead of Chromium, with accessibility-tree output.
  • playwright-stealth / undetected-chromedriver / puppeteer-extra — config- or JS-injection-level; the README’s whole argument is that these break on every Chrome update and get detected by the patches themselves.
  • Camoufox (Firefox source patches) — the engine behind Camofox Browser; same C++ philosophy, different engine.
  • Commercial stealth-scraping APIs — do the fingerprint evasion but bill per request.

⚠️ Note

Anti-detection browsing is dual-use: appropriate for automating sites you’re authorized to use, respecting terms and rate limits. CloakBrowser doesn’t solve CAPTCHAs — it prevents them appearing — and brings no proxies (bring your own residential IPs).

Licensing: the Python + JS wrappers are MIT, free forever. The binary uses a delayed-free model — the previous Chromium (v146, 58 patches) is free on GitHub Releases and goes stale within weeks; the latest (Chromium 148, 59 patches, all platforms incl. macOS) is CloakBrowser Pro via a license key from cloakbrowser.dev. Binary downloads are Ed25519-signature verified.

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