Alternative to headless browser in C# without external executables

Other Questions Headless Browser
1

I’m trying to use a headless browser in my C# project but I’ve hit a roadblock. Most solutions like Headless Chrome need to call an .exe file which I can’t do due to strict restrictions. I can’t use any external executables at all.

I’ve thought about serializing the exe or even decompiling it to make a DLL but that seems too complicated. Using a VM to emulate Windows would work but it’d be way too slow for my needs.

Does anyone know of a way to get a headless browser working in C# without calling any external files? I’m open to alternatives to Chrome if they exist. Any ideas would be really helpful!

Here’s a basic example of what I’m trying to do:

public class WebScraper
{
    private IBrowser _browser;

    public WebScraper()
    {
        // Need a way to initialize browser without external exe
        _browser = new HeadlessBrowser();
    }

    public async Task ScrapeWebsite(string url)
    {
        var page = await _browser.NewPageAsync();
        await page.GoToAsync(url);
        var content = await page.GetContentAsync();
        // Process content here
    }
}

Any suggestions on how to make this work without external dependencies?

2

Having faced similar constraints, I can suggest an alternative approach that might work for your situation. Consider using AngleSharp, a powerful .NET library that provides DOM parsing and manipulation capabilities without external dependencies. It can handle most HTML parsing tasks and even execute some JavaScript, though not as comprehensively as a full browser.

Here’s a basic example of how you could adapt your code:

using AngleSharp;
using AngleSharp.Dom;

public class WebScraper
{
    private IBrowsingContext _context;

    public WebScraper()
    {
        _context = BrowsingContext.New(Configuration.Default.WithDefaultLoader());
    }

    public async Task ScrapeWebsite(string url)
    {
        var document = await _context.OpenAsync(url);
        var content = document.DocumentElement.OuterHtml;
        // Process content here
    }
}

This approach should meet your requirements without external executables while providing decent functionality for many web scraping tasks.

3

hey man, i feel ur pain. have u looked into puppeteer-sharp? it’s a .NET port of Puppeteer and doesnt need external exes. it can do most headless browser stuff right in C#. might be worth checkin out if u havent already. good luck with ur project!

4

In my experience, I encountered a similar problem and decided against using a full headless browser when external executables were not an option. Instead, I switched to a simpler approach with HttpClient to retrieve the HTML content and then processed it with a parsing library like HtmlAgilityPack. While this method doesn’t execute JavaScript or fully emulate a browser, it works well for many tasks and avoids dependency on external files. For situations requiring some JS handling, a tool like Jint can sometimes fill the gap.