Why I’m building Mimic

I’m Slava. After years of browser automation, I kept running into the same choice: make everything work over HTTP, or pay for an entire browser.

The gap I kept coming back to

HTTP is fast and inexpensive. But on complex websites, the missing browser behavior becomes your problem: client-side scripts, state, navigation and the observations a site expects. Eventually, reproducing that behavior takes more effort than the automation itself.

Chromium handles much of that work for you. It also brings a rendering stack to jobs that may only need JavaScript and a few values from the DOM. I wanted something between those extremes.

That question became Mimic

I started building a browser execution runtime in Go around V8. The browser environment lives in Mimic: DOM, networking, frames, Workers and observable state. CDP lets familiar automation tools connect to it.

The aim is to bring execution time and resource costs closer to HTTP while preserving the browser behavior the workload depends on, including consistent observations used in fingerprinting. It is an engineering goal, not a promise that every workflow already works.

Compatibility through evidence

I compare behavior against Chrome 152 and fix the underlying semantics when execution diverges. Real workloads are how I learn which missing capabilities matter. Mimic is still a public beta; some workloads favor Chrome, and compatibility remains incomplete.

Bring the workflow that breaks it

If browser startup, memory or concurrency is getting in your way, I’d like to understand your case. I’m happy to work with early users on integration and compatibility rather than guess what they need.