Browser-based and no-browser web data harvesting: Tools to operate with the best datacenter proxies
Contents of article:
- What is web scraping with and without a browser for the best datacenter proxies’ users
- Browser-based scraping tools
- No-browser web data harvesting solutions
- Dexodata for web scraping: browser-based and no-browser
The typical extraction of publicly available online information comprises choosing and adjusting software, deploying and maintaining it. Then engineers transform and categorize gathered insights. Buying residential IP pools from Dexodata or other ethical ecosystems is a prerequisite to access geo-targeted data.
The difference lies in using a browser in the organized pipeline, leading to choosing a browser-based or no-browser approach. Appropriate tools and a type of proxies (the best datacenter ones, residential or mobile IPs) depend on the task. We will concentrate on open source solutions for internet data collection.
What is web scraping with and without a browser for the best datacenter proxies’ users
Browser-based scraping includes operations with a real browser or its emulation in a headless mode, without a graphical interface. Browser-oriented method suits complex dynamic sites that rely on JavaScript heavily and employ dynamic fingerprinting checks. No-browser approach is faster, easier to scale and automate. Both ways requires modification of HTTP headers and buying 4G proxies to boost web data harvesting.
No-browser info collection implies operating direct HTTP requests and HTML responses’ parsing. This results in sparing traffic and enhancing data transfer at the cost of lowered performance of JS-oriented online sources. Large-scale projects, therefore, include leveraging both methods and tools listed below.
Browser-based scraping tools
Instruments applied for headless or full-interface browsing vary according to applied machine language and objectives. Considering the sites’ protection, the info gathering team buys residential IP addresses or datacenter ones
| Tool | Language | Description | Key Features |
| Selenium | Python, Java, Perl, C#, etc. |
Flexible solution for automating browsers |
Supports:
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| Puppeteer |
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Google-developed library for headless browser automation through the best proxies: datacenter, residential, etc. |
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| Scrapy-Splash | Python |
Integration of Scrapy plus Splash for JavaScript rendering |
Uses:
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| Pyppeteer | Python port of Puppeteer serving Chromium automation | Performs HTTP requests directly without rendering, handles cookies, sessions, and asynchronous operations, generates screenshots and PDFs, intercepts network requests | |
| Helium | Simplified interface for Selenium-based automations | Facilitates headless browsing due to a simple syntax for handling JS-based sites |
No-browser web data harvesting solutions
The main principle of harvesting internet insights without a browser lies in avoiding JavaScript or Web API and performing requests with responses’ processing instead. Necessity to buy 4G proxies depends on the pipeline’s scale and details:
| Tool | Language | Description | Key Features |
| Beautiful Soup | Python |
Versatile and customizable HTML/XML parsing tool | Supports multiple parsers to choose from and various browsers, handles malformed HTML |
| Scrapy | Open-source extensible middleware for obtaining internet information |
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| lxml | XML/HTML content processing suite | Operates XPath and XSLT, suits for large-scale scraping tasks | |
| HTTPie | A command-line HTTP client |
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| jsoup | Java |
Works with real-world HTML | Maintains manipulating and cleaning HTML, has a flexible DOM traversal |
| Mechanize | Python, Ruby |
Automates interaction with sites, cookies, forms, and more in the Ruby-based data extraction pipelines | Simulates browser interactions at different levels, incl. redirects and authentication through API |
| Cheerio | JavaScript |
Implementation of core jQuery for server-side use | Lightweight solution to manipulate HTML |
| Colly | Go |
Web scraping framework | Performs asynchronous scraping, automatically deals with cookies and sessions, engages IP rotation for residential IPs, if you buy any |
Choosing between Scrapy and BeautifulSoup, apply the first for building a full-cycle info extraction and processing framework. BeautifulSoup works better for structuring the collected data and can handle browser-based tasks along with Selenium.
Dexodata for web scraping: browser-based and no-browser
Large-scale projects of acquiring insights from dynamic sites may require using combinations of solutions or integrated tools, such as Playwright and Requests-HTML. The Dexodata ecosystem supports all-type web data harvesting as a service, strictly compliant with AML and KYC policies. Buy Dexodata’s 4G proxies or the best datacenter proxies for ethical info gathering at scale.
