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A short history of web bots and bot detection techniques
Did you know your favorite website can detect when you're browsing it in public transport or when you scroll it in your bed? Moreover, this info sometimes helps them to fight bots.
While headless browser itself now looks a lot like a real thing, they are still managed by orchestration software like Selenium or Playwright, the presence of which adds to “attack surface” which can be used to detect automation. For example, you wouldn’t want your browser to do background activity (like checking for updates) or try to sync to a Google account, so these frameworks disable this functionality by passing corresponding flags. Those are, essentially, full-fledged bot detection services with a minor difference: those challenges work as a gate to particular parts or features of the website instead of monitoring the client continuously.
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