July 7, 2026
Sneak attack or internet villain?
Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
A 'sneaky browser' drops and the comments instantly turn into a bot ethics cage match
TLDR: Fortress is a modified Chrome-like browser that helps bots and AI agents look human so websites are less likely to block them. Commenters immediately split between “dangerous and unethical” and “probably overhyped anyway,” turning the launch into a full-on internet morals fight.
A new project called Fortress is pitching itself as the ultimate "look normal" browser for scrapers and AI agents. In plain English: it’s a modified version of Chrome meant to help automated tools blend in like regular people so websites don’t block them. The maker says it can pass popular bot tests and even get through live anti-bot checks with almost no code changes. For anyone building data-scraping tools, that sounds like a magic trick. For everyone else? Cue the screaming.
The real fireworks came from the comments, where the launch immediately turned into an ethics brawl. One camp basically asked, are we really normalizing tools designed to ignore a website’s “no bots” sign? TrevorFSmith warned that small site owners are already getting crushed by endless automated traffic and rising hosting bills. Xena went even harder, saying projects like this make them wish tech workers had to pass ethics classes before shipping anything. Ouch.
Then came the apocalypse predictions. Csnover argued this is exactly how the internet gets pushed toward device ID checks everywhere, with ordinary users eventually paying the price. On the other side, skeptics weren’t even convinced the product is that unstoppable: xnx dryly suggested it probably only beats the most basic defenses. And yes, there was comic relief too: one commenter roasted the name itself, joking that if it sneaks into fortresses, maybe it shouldn’t be called Fortress at all. The bot wars are here, and even the branding isn’t safe.
Key Points
- •Fortress is presented as a Chromium fork that modifies browser fingerprint surfaces inside Chromium’s C++ engine rather than through JavaScript patches.
- •The project is designed as a drop-in browser replacement for Playwright, Puppeteer, and other CDP clients, requiring minimal code changes.
- •The article says Fortress uses 34 auditable single-purpose patches, monthly upstream rebases, and reproducible releases.
- •It claims native-code parity across browser realms, including the main frame, iframes, and Web Workers, so spoofed properties appear as real native getters.
- •The article cites detector results including 0% headless on CreepJS, green results on Sannysoft, “Normal” on BrowserScan, and passing a live Cloudflare Turnstile challenge.