When I was working before on something that used headless browser agents, the ability to do a screenshot (or even a recording) was really great for debugging... so I am not sure about the "no paint". But hey everything in life is a trade-off.
Really depends on what you want to do with the agents. Just yesterday I was looking for something like this for our web access MCP server[0]. The only thing that it needs to do is visit a website and get the content (with JS support, as it's expected that most pages today use JS), and then convert that to e.g. Markdown.
I'm not too happy with the fact that Chrome is one of our memory-hungriest parts of all the MCP servers we have in use. The only thing that exceeds that in our whole stack is the Clickhouse shard, which comes with Langfuse. Especially if you are looking to build a "deep research" feature that may access a few hundreds of webpages in a short timeframe, having a lightweight alternative like Lightpanda can make quite the difference.
Well, it was "normal" crawlers that needed to work perfectly and deterministically (as best as possible), not probabilistically (AI); speed was no issue. And I wanted to debug when something went wrong. So yeah for me it was crucial to be able to record/screenshot.
So yeah, everything is a trade-off, and we needed a different trade-off; we actually decided to not use headless chromium, because they are slight differences, so we ended up using full chrome (not even chromium, again - slight differences) with xvfb. It was very, very memory hungry; but again was not an issue
(I used "agent" as in "browser agent", not "AI agent", I should be more precise I guess.)
yeah I feel the same, I think even having a screenshot of part of rendered page or full page can be useful even for machines considering how heavy those HTML can be to parse and expensive for LLM context. Sometimes (sub)screenshot is just a better kind of compression
I've spent some time feeding llm with scrapped web pages and I've found that retaining some style information (text size, visibility, decoration image content) is non trivial.
markdown is horrible, horrible format to parse; there are so many ambiguities; CommonMark is so complex because of that and still has so many ambiguities.
it's like YAML: it looks so simple at first, and then the horrors start if you try to use it seriously.
in both cases the most horrors lie in the spaces/tabs/newlines.
> markdown is horrible, horrible format to parse...
I agree entirely. But it's a lovely format to use. Programming as a profession is entirely about making things easier for our users, even if it means making things harder for ourselves.
After all, that's the whole ethos around the web as a platform. Throw some broken HTML soup at a browser and it'll still try its best to render it.
note that this is all about football streaming, which is so funny
as far as i can tell, it's really not about politics or surveillance... it's really just about football streaming, and they push the 30 minute thing because it's important for them to stop it during the match.
it's stupid; but it's even more stupid to do draconian censorship for... football streaming.
I am not sure what you are saying with respect to red lines.
Vietnamese government will not arrest a tourist foreigner for talking bad about the party or about Ho Chi Minh, it would decimate their tourist bottom line. If you don't deal with drugs or actively don't organise against the party, you will be fine.
There is a growing surveillance (which you cited well) but mostly for locals.
edit: oh I misread, you are Viet Kieu, not a western tourist. OK yeah that makes some sense.
Not for me.
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