Should I use a browser-based crawler or plain HTTP requests?

It depends on what you’re trying to crawl.

Use plain HTTP requests if:

• The site’s content is available in the initial HTML response
• You want speed, simplicity, and lower resource usage
• You’re crawling at scale
• You don’t need JavaScript rendering
• You’re mostly extracting:
  • article pages
  • product listings
  • APIs / JSON endpoints
  • static pages

Pros

• Faster
• Easier to debug
• Cheaper to run
• Less fragile than browser automation

Cons

• Can’t handle JS-rendered content
• May miss lazy-loaded data
• Some sites require browser behavior to access content

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Use a browser-based crawler if:

• The page content is rendered by JavaScript
• Data loads after interaction, scrolling, or clicking
• You need to handle:
  • SPAs
  • infinite scroll
  • login flows
  • cookie banners / modals
  • canvas-heavy or app-like sites
• The site blocks simple requests and expects real browser behavior

Pros

• Works on dynamic sites
• More faithful to what a user sees
• Can handle complex workflows

Cons

• Much slower
• Higher CPU/memory usage
• More brittle
• Harder to scale

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Practical rule of thumb

1. Try HTTP first
2. If the content isn’t there, inspect whether it’s loaded from an API
3. Only use a browser if you truly need rendering or interaction

In many cases, the best approach is:

• HTTP crawler for most pages
• browser fallback for difficult pages

A good hybrid strategy

• Use a browser to discover network/API calls
• Then switch to plain HTTP requests for actual extraction whenever possible

If you want, I can also give you a decision tree or a comparison table for specific tools like Playwright, Scrapy, or requests/httpx.