claude code's built-in webfetch handles the easy case well. it summarizes wikipedia to about 950 tokens and clears cloudflare on some sites like indeed and ticketmaster. but, and there's always a but, on js-rendered and some anti-bot pages it returns nothing.
quotes.toscrape.com/js gives "no quotes found"; nike.com gives a 403. your agent then dumps the raw html back into context and still fails. (note: i have also had cases where i read through the chat at the end and saw that it failed and just pulled from either training data or stale caches from other sources)
so i worked on building an open-source stealth browser (recompiled chromium) that runs as an mcp for claude code, cursor, and claude desktop. essentially all i have to change form my end is add the mcp, and it returns the cleaned up tokens while also beating detection: the js quotes come back in 285 tokens, nike in about 700 instead of a 403.
there is still stuff i am actively working on: there's no residential egress yet, and it won't beat kasada-style walls. it's for agents, qa, and research.
repo and the reproducible benchmark: https://github.com/tiliondev/fortress/tree/main/mcp i'm the author and here for feedback.
yeah, and my (human piloted) browser gets blocked by so many websites now. I routinely get "Sorry." when trying to log into hn.
sigh.
At this rate, we'll need to use bots to browse the web for us, because they're the only way to get through the anti-bot filters.