This blog post is written that way because the guy works in the bot detection business so it's what he cares most about.

But there are still plenty of legitimate use cases for wanting a headless browser that perfectly replicates a normal browser environment. The obvious ones are automated frontend testing tools like https://playwright.dev/

Exactly. And as the blog post mentioned, people who have a strong need to block bots have tools other than browser fingerprinting at their disposal. Quoth the post:

> It’s important to leverage other signals such as:

>

> * Behavior (client-side and server-side)

> * Different kinds of reputations (IP, sessions, user)

> * Proxy detection, in particular, residential proxy detection

> * Contextual information: time of the day, country, etc

> * TLS fingerprinting.

Having a headless browser that behaves exactly like a normal one is tremendously useful for making things. And people who really *need* to block bots also need to contend with "mechanical turk" style attackers anyway. These techniques are also very useful against that approach, which still may be cheaper than making an undetectable bot even with a near-perfect Chrome fingerprint available headless.

We use a headless browser to load an internal webpage (with content that may be updated several times per day) and generate a pdf on-demand.

As a bot developer, without taking legal steps (I do not break the law) there is no stopping me regardless.

Because none of the people complaining about headless bots (read probably: content and retail) are major stakeholders from Chrome's viewpoint.

headless browsers or are faster than the normal browsers (no GUI) so your tests run faster