playwright-sharp VS CefSharp

Or https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-sharp

There are multiple ways to do this. For web scraping like you describe, I would use Playwright-sharp.

I've used PuppeteerSharp for web automation with great success. I understand that project is now Playwright-Sharp. I would highly recommend that over something like Selenium which is really more for testing.

Using either Puppeteer or Playwright to scrape a web page is super simple. Both have their own .NET ported versions like Puppeteer Sharp and Playwright Sharp respectively. However, they don't work on Azure Functions, unfortunately. More precisely, they work on your local dev environment, not on Azure instance. This post would be useful for your node.js Azure Functions app, but it's not that helpful for your .NET application. Let me find a way for it to work on Azure Functions instance correctly.

The Fullscreen Chromium (cefsharp) based Web-Browser ignores optionally user input like Mouse clicks, and is optionally always in the foreground (Force-Top-Most), so it can be used for any situation.

Just as a background: I'm working on a façade for the CefSharp utility. This utility requires the programmer to initialize and terminate it in the same thread, once-per-process. My current implementation uses a lazy initialization algorithm requiring inter-thread communication. But the possibility of AppDomains arising or passing away complicates the algorithm by requiring threads to potentially signal one another across AppDomain boundaries. It would be easier to just let the threads communicate without worrying about which AppDomain they belonged to.

I dont want to state the obvious but of course there is CefSharp .. But of course thats pretty heavy duty as you end shipping a headless version of Chrome in your app, but it can do anything a browser can do (of course it can, its Chrome), including exectuting a JavaScript string on the fly and getting a response. Because its Chrome you evenn have access the the dev tool and everything like that. But the other suggestions might be better suited as they might be more lightweight.

Two options: Either use an embedded browser you can control programmatically like CefSharp (https://cefsharp.github.io/) or spawn a real browser and use sendkeys() to control the browser by emulating user input.

Chrome Runtime discussion in CefSharp repository.

https://github.com/cefsharp/CefSharp/ if i spiked your intrigue

CefSharp

I always use https://cefsharp.github.io/