Browser Fingerprints

One of the core features that sets the Intoli Smart Proxy Service apart from other proxy networks is its ability to automatically render any HTTP request in a full browser. It has become increasingly common for websites to rely on JavaScript to render page content, and our browser rendering feature allows you to successfully scrape these sites using traditional scraping tools, such as Scrapy, which simply weren't designed to integrate with full browsers. Most scraping tools can be trivially integrated with the Intoli Smart Proxy Service in order to facilitate browser rendering, regardless of whether the tools were written with browser rendering in mind.

In addition to being useful for JavaScript-heavy websites, browser rendering is essential to avoid blocking on many popular websites today. Services such as Distil, Incapsula, and Perimeter X require aggressive JavaScript fingerprinting code to run before web pages are loaded. This code performs a series of invasive tests designed to collect identifiable details about the user, their browser, and their operating system. These sort of browser fingerprints are widely used to track users across websites for advertising purposes as well as to block users who are suspected of being bots.

Using a browser automation framework like Puppeteer or Selenium allows for bot-mitigation services' fingerprinting code to evaluate successfully, but they're generally very easily detected due to a variety of easily detectable signatures. The Intoli Smart Proxy Service's browser rendering feature runs full browsers that are carefully configured with randomized browser fingerprints to get around this sort of blocking. Our browser fingerprints are updated regularly and are implemented using cutting edge techniques to bypass browser fingerprinting.

In the rest of this section, we'll explain about some of the most commonly used browser fingerprinting techniques. This can serve as a good starting point if you're interested in implementing browser overrides yourself, and it also makes for a good introduction to how the Intoli Smart Proxy Service helps prevent bots from getting detected.