AI Browser Automation in 2026: Camoufox, Nodriver & Stealth MCP

Browser automation in 2026 has fractured into two realities. On one side, standard tools like Playwright and Puppeteer remain useful for testing your own sites. On the other, anyone automating across third-party domains needs stealth—tools specifically designed to bypass fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and the increasingly sophisticated ML models that guard modern websites. This guide compares the three leading options: Camoufox (Firefox-based antidetect), Nodriver (async Chrome without WebDriver), and Stealth Browser MCP (managed AI-native automation from Proxies.sx).

Why Antidetect Is Mandatory in 2026

The detection landscape has changed fundamentally. It is no longer enough to set a user-agent string and hope for the best. Here is what automation scripts face in 2026:

The bottom line: standard Puppeteer or Selenium scripts are detected instantly on any site using Cloudflare, Akamai, or DataDome. You need a tool built from the ground up for stealth.

Camoufox: Firefox-Based Stealth (Pros/Cons in 2026)

Camoufox takes a fundamentally different approach from Chrome-based tools. Built on a modified Firefox engine, it rewrites browser internals to produce consistent, non-leaking fingerprints. The latest release is v146.0.1-beta.25 (January 2026)—explicitly experimental.

How It Works

Camoufox patches Firefox at the engine level. Instead of bolting stealth features on top of a standard browser (like stealth plugins for Puppeteer), it modifies how the browser reports its own properties. Canvas fingerprints, WebGL renderers, font enumeration, screen dimensions, and navigator properties are all rewritten internally to produce a coherent, consistent identity.

This engine-level approach is Camoufox's greatest strength. Because Firefox handles rendering, JavaScript execution, and network communication differently from Chrome, it provides automatic browser engine diversity—an increasingly important factor as detection systems build Chrome-specific behavioral models.

Nodriver: Chrome Without WebDriver

Nodriver is the official successor to undetected-chromedriver, built by the same author. Where the original project patched Selenium to hide automation flags, nodriver is a complete rewrite: fully async, zero Selenium dependency, and built on a custom Chrome DevTools Protocol implementation.

The philosophy is elegant. Instead of trying to make an automation framework look like a real browser, nodriver launches a real Chrome instance and communicates with it directly via CDP. There is no navigator.webdriver flag because there is no WebDriver. There are no automation markers because there is no automation framework injecting them.

# Nodriver: one-line browser launch
import nodriver as uc

async def main():
    browser = await uc.start()
    page = await browser.get("https://example.com")

    # Find and interact with elements
    search_box = await page.select("input[name='q']")
    await search_box.send_keys("nodriver automation")

    # Screenshot
    await page.save_screenshot("result.png")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    uc.loop().run_until_complete(main())

Stealth Browser MCP: AI-Controlled Automation

Stealth Browser MCP at browser.proxies.sx represents the managed alternative. Rather than running stealth browsers locally and managing proxy rotation yourself, it packages nodriver technology into a cloud service that AI agents control via the Model Context Protocol.

The service exposes 90 MCP tools across 11 categories: browser control, element interaction, data extraction, network interception, CDP functions, file export, progressive cloning, cookie management, tab control, debugging, and dynamic hooks. An AI agent—Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client—can navigate sites, fill forms, extract structured data, and manage sessions through natural language commands.

The trade-off is clear: Stealth Browser MCP requires an MCP-compatible AI client. If your workflow is pure scripting without an AI layer, nodriver or Camoufox give you direct control. But for AI agent workflows—which represent the fastest-growing segment of web automation—the managed approach eliminates operational overhead entirely.

Comparison: Detection Rates, Speed, Ease of Use

The following table compares all three stealth tools against plain Playwright as a baseline. Detection rates are approximate and depend heavily on target site, proxy quality, and configuration.

Why You Still Need Mobile Proxies (Even with Stealth Browsers)

This is the point most guides miss. A stealth browser handles the fingerprint layer—making your browser look like a real user's browser. But modern detection stacks have a completely separate IP reputation layer that operates independently.

A perfectly spoofed fingerprint coming from a known datacenter IP (AWS, GCP, Hetzner) will still get blocked. Datacenter ASNs are the first thing detection systems check, and they flag them regardless of how clean the browser looks.

Mobile proxies provide IPs from real 4G/5G carriers—T-Mobile, Verizon, Vodafone, and regional providers. These IPs are shared by thousands of legitimate smartphone users through Carrier-Grade NAT, giving them the highest possible trust score. When you combine a stealth browser with a mobile proxy IP, both detection layers see legitimate signals. That combination is what actually works at scale.

Implementation: Camoufox + Mobile Proxy

The following Python example shows how to configure Camoufox with a Proxies.sx mobile proxy. This routes all browser traffic through a real 4G/5G mobile IP, combining engine-level fingerprint spoofing with carrier-grade IP reputation.

# camoufox_mobile_proxy.py
# Camoufox + Proxies.sx 4G/5G mobile proxy integration

from camoufox.sync_api import Camoufox

# Proxies.sx mobile proxy credentials
PROXY_HOST = "us.proxies.sx"
PROXY_PORT = 5057
PROXY_USER = "your_username"
PROXY_PASS = "your_password"

def scrape_with_stealth():
    """Launch Camoufox with mobile proxy for maximum stealth."""

    with Camoufox(
        headless=False,
        # Proxies.sx mobile proxy configuration
        proxy={
            "server": f"socks5://{PROXY_HOST}:{PROXY_PORT}",
            "username": PROXY_USER,
            "password": PROXY_PASS,
        },
        # Camoufox handles fingerprint internally:
        # - Canvas/WebGL spoofing
        # - Font enumeration masking
        # - Navigator property consistency
        # - Screen dimension normalization
    ) as browser:
        page = browser.new_page()

        # Navigate to a Cloudflare-protected target
        page.goto("https://target-site.com", wait_until="networkidle")

        # Verify we passed detection
        title = page.title()
        print(f"Page title: {title}")

        # Check for Cloudflare challenge page
        if "challenge" in page.url.lower():
            print("Blocked by Cloudflare challenge")
            return None

        # Extract data
        content = page.content()
        print(f"Extracted {len(content)} chars of page content")

        # Save screenshot as proof
        page.screenshot(path="stealth_result.png")
        print("Screenshot saved: stealth_result.png")

        return content

if __name__ == "__main__":
    result = scrape_with_stealth()
    if result:
        print("Scraping successful with mobile proxy + Camoufox")

Key points about this implementation: Camoufox handles the browser fingerprint layer entirely at the engine level, while the SOCKS5 proxy routes all traffic through a real mobile IP. The headless=False option runs a visible browser—while Camoufox supports headless mode, headed mode generally achieves higher bypass rates because some detection checks specifically target headless rendering behavior.

The Managed Alternative: browser.proxies.sx

For teams that do not want to manage browser installations, proxy rotation, fingerprint configurations, and Chrome version updates, Stealth Browser MCP at browser.proxies.sx packages everything into an API-driven service.

The trade-off is dependency: you need an MCP-compatible AI client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, or similar). For pure scripting workflows, self-hosted nodriver or Camoufox give you more direct control. But for the growing number of teams building AI agent systems, the managed route eliminates an entire category of infrastructure concerns.

Learn more about the full MCP tool catalog in our detailed guide: Stealth Browser MCP: Undetectable AI Automation Guide.

Frequently Asked Questions