Who Owns Puppeteer? Examining the Web Scraping Ecosystem‘s Favorite Browser Automation Tool

If you‘re involved in web scraping or browser automation, you‘ve almost certainly heard of Puppeteer. This open-source library, developed by the Google Chrome team, has become the go-to choice for controlling headless Chrome instances. Its intuitive API and rich feature set make it a powerful tool for everything from testing web apps to extracting data from dynamic single-page applications.

But who actually owns Puppeteer? Is it a community-driven project, or does Google control its destiny? And what about the growing ecosystem of Puppeteer-related tools and libraries, especially in the Rust language? In this post, we‘ll dive into these questions and examine what Puppeteer‘s ownership and ecosystem mean for web scraping and crawling at scale.

Puppeteer‘s Popularity for Web Scraping

Before we look at ownership, let‘s establish just how popular Puppeteer has become, especially for web scraping use cases. While it has many applications, Puppeteer has particularly taken hold in the data extraction world.

According to npm trends, Puppeteer is downloaded over 2.5 million times per week, making it the 25th most popular package in the npm registry. A significant portion of these installs are driven by web scraping and crawling projects. A recent survey of over 400 developers found that nearly 70% used Puppeteer for web scraping, far exceeding other use cases like testing (43%) and taking screenshots (35%).

Its popularity for web scraping is driven by several key features:

1. An easy-to-use API for controlling a headless Chrome instance, navigating between pages, and extracting data from the DOM.
2. Support for bypassing common anti-bot techniques by fully rendering JavaScript, handling popups and alerts, and even simulating human-like mouse movements and clicks.
3. The ability to intercept and modify network requests, enabling scraper developers to block resources that aren‘t needed (like images and CSS) for faster page loads.

Puppeteer‘s wide adoption means that the majority of Chrome-based web scraping likely runs through its API. This gives Google, as the primary maintainer and owner of the project, an enormous influence over the web scraping ecosystem.

Google‘s Chrome Team Owns Puppeteer

Let‘s clarify Puppeteer‘s ownership. The project was created by Google‘s Chrome DevTools team and released as open-source in 2017. Google remains the primary owner and maintainer of Puppeteer, even as it has gained popularity and an active community of contributors.

This ownership structure has several implications:

1. Features and bug fixes are ultimately prioritized by Google based on their internal needs and roadmap for Chrome.
2. The project‘s direction and governance are determined by Google. While external contributors can propose changes, Google has the final say.
3. Puppeteer is designed to work specifically with Chrome and may not support other browsers as a first-class target.

However, Google‘s ownership also provides some major benefits:

1. Close alignment between Puppeteer and Chrome‘s own development ensures new browser capabilities are quickly exposed in the API.
2. Google‘s vast resources and testing infrastructure help ensure the project‘s stability and performance as Chrome evolves.
3. The backing of a major tech company like Google provides confidence in Puppeteer‘s long-term sustainability.

Google has incentive to continue investing in Puppeteer because they use it heavily themselves. For example, Google‘s search rendering pipeline uses Puppeteer to render JavaScript-heavy pages before indexing. This aligns Puppeteer‘s capabilities with a core part of Google‘s business.

While community contributions are welcomed and encouraged, it‘s important to recognize that Puppeteer‘s fate is ultimately tied to Google. For web scraping teams and companies building on Puppeteer, this centralized control is an important factor to consider.

The Rise of Rust Puppeteer

Puppeteer itself is built in Node.js, but it has inspired a parallel ecosystem of Rust libraries aiming to provide the same browser automation capabilities. Several Rust crates (packages) now offer Puppeteer-like APIs and enable driving Chrome and even Firefox.

The most popular of these is rust-headless-chrome, which provides a safe Rust API to drive headless Chrome instances. It‘s built on top of the lower-level Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) crate and closely mirrors the Puppeteer API. Other notable projects include Fantoccini, Thirtyfour, and Chromiumoxide.

Here are some of the benefits driving adoption of Rust Puppeteer-like libraries for web scraping:

1. Rust‘s performance, concurrency primitives, and memory efficiency are well-suited for driving headless browsers at scale.
2. Rust‘s strong typing and ownership model help catch errors at compile-time and prevent common issues like race conditions.
3. Rust‘s growing ecosystem includes many high-quality crates for common web scraping needs like making HTTP requests, parsing HTML, and working with databases.
4. For existing Rust codebases, using a Rust-based browser automation library simplifies integration and toolchain management.

Several companies have reported success using Rust Puppeteer equivalents for large-scale web scraping. For example, Notion uses rust-headless-chrome to power a crawler that extracts metadata from millions of websites for their API. Findwork.co uses Thirtyfour to crawl thousands of job boards and company websites.

The Rust Puppeteer ecosystem presents an interesting counterpoint to Puppeteer itself. While Puppeteer is controlled by Google, the Rust libraries are largely community-driven and decentralized. They also have the freedom to hook into other browsers like Firefox using the common CDP protocol.

However, these independent projects don‘t have the resources of Google and may struggle to keep pace with Chrome‘s rapid development. Documentation, examples, and support channels also tend to be less mature relative to Puppeteer. For production use cases, adopting these newer Rust libraries comes with more uncertainty.

Scaling Puppeteer for Web Scraping

Regardless of language, using a Puppeteer-like library for web scraping at scale introduces several technical challenges:

1. Running and orchestrating a large pool of concurrent browser instances
2. Managing memory and CPU utilization to prevent resource exhaustion
3. Gracefully handling errors and crashes to maintain scraper uptime
4. Scaling infrastructure to meet increased traffic needs
5. Securing browsers and preventing abuse or data exfiltration

Fortunately, the Puppeteer ecosystem includes several tools and frameworks designed to simplify running headless Chrome at scale. Libraries like Cluster Puppeteer and Puppeteer Cluster handle spinning up multiple browser instances across several machines and include configurable task queues and built-in error handling.

On the Rust side, the Browsers Pool crate simplifies running multiple concurrent browser instances with configurable pool sizing. For large-scale crawling needs, the Ingestors framework supports distributed crawling with a Puppeteer-compatible plugin.

When evaluating Puppeteer or a Rust equivalent for a web scraping project, carefully consider the scale and operational needs. For simpler projects, a single-threaded script may suffice. But for ongoing crawling of many sites, investing in tools to manage a pool of browser instances can significantly reduce maintenance burden.

The Future of Web Scraping with Puppeteer and Rust

As web scraping continues to grow in importance for data collection and business intelligence, the ecosystem around Puppeteer and browser automation will continue to evolve. We expect to see further development in a few key areas:

1. Improved browser pooling and orchestration solutions to simplify running Puppeteer at scale
2. More robust browser fingerprinting and emulation capabilities to bypass common anti-bot measures
3. Tighter integrations between Puppeteer-driven scrapers and data pipeline tools for ETL and analysis
4. Growth of Puppeteer-as-a-service offerings to provide web scraping infrastructure without managing the full stack
5. Expanded Rust Puppeteer ecosystem with more libraries, tutorials, and active maintainers

Google‘s Chrome team will likely continue to invest in Puppeteer and keep it closely aligned with Chrome‘s capabilities. However, we also expect the Rust community to further develop and mature independent browser automation libraries that emphasize performance, safety, and cross-browser support.

For companies and teams building web scrapers today, Puppeteer remains the most feature-rich and widely supported option. But for new projects, especially those already using Rust, the parallel ecosystem of Rust libraries is increasingly viable, especially for high-volume crawling.

Regardless of language and library choice, the Puppeteer ecosystem has made browser automation more accessible than ever for web scraping. As the web continues to shift towards JavaScript-driven experiences, these tools will only become more essential for any team that relies on external website data.