Why I'm Building a Browser No Human Will Ever Use

I am building a browser that will never render a single pixel. No address bar. No tabs. No bookmarks. No window at all. Nobody will ever "open" Plasmate the way they open Chrome or Firefox or Safari. It has no visual interface because its consumer has no eyes. This sounds absurd until you think about who is actually browsing the web in 2026. The absurd premise that turned out to be obvious When I first described Plasmate to other developers, the reaction was usually some version of: "Why not just use Playwright? Or Puppeteer? Or headless Chrome?" These are reasonable questions. They have headless modes. They can fetch pages and return HTML. The tools exist. But consider what headless Chrome actually does when you ask it to "browse" a page. It launches a full rendering engine. It constructs a layout tree. It calculates pixel positions for every element. It composites layers. It rasterizes text into bitmap glyphs. It computes box shadows, border radii, gradient interpolations, and subpix