devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development Joel Griffith - Browserless
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Feb 16, 2026 Joel Griffith, founder and CEO of Browserless and former jazz musician turned engineer, built a cloud service to run headless browsers at scale. He talks about the origin story, deep operational headaches like memory and browser flags, practical uses such as scraping and testing, the BrowserQL tool for turning sites into queryable APIs, and plans for multi-browser support and sustainability.
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Wishlist App Sparked Browserless
- Joel built a wishlist app that needed metadata from SPA sites and ran into client-side rendering issues.
- That concrete problem led him to Puppeteer and the idea of offering browsers-as-a-service.
Scaling Browsers Is Mostly Glue Work
- Running headless browsers at scale exposes many platform and packaging edge cases beyond the libraries.
- The core trade-off is owning brittle infrastructure versus outsourcing that maintenance to a service.
Automate Binary Regression Testing
- Test browser binaries and platform changes with automated specs to catch regressions early.
- Run hundreds of reproducible checks on every binary update to avoid surprise breakage.