LebronMessi
Newbie
- May 7, 2025
- 20
- 5
So I noticed something interesting today, while warming up one of my browsers non-headless to monitor behavior, I saw a weird button that appeared on the google homepage. It's really rare and the first time I saw it, I stopped all automation, tried to move my mouse to try and inspect it but it would disappear as soon as it detected any manual movement on my end. After trying to recreate the scenario in which the button appears again (I probably tried like 50 times), I finally got it to reappear, immediately killed my script, and got it to stick on the page so that I can inspect it's behavior through my bot application's API, and for the life of me could not figure out what the hell was going on.
I tried every technique I know to try and capture the page element somehow, which led to nothing. Then took a snapshot of the browser with Playwright, and the button wasn't even there. Also tried just saving the instance of the browser to open locally, and this ghost button would not appear at all. It's some anti-detection measure that is not happening on the page level but on some sort of GPU level since google owns the entire browser and has the ability to implement these kind of measures while another website wouldn't.
Hard to find any resources online about any sort of GPU-layer detection. First pic shows what playwright captured. Ignore the red outline, I was just trying to see if I can query for "search" and try to outline it somehow. Second pic shows pic taken from my phone camera (lol).
Thought you guys might find this interesting. Anyone encounter something similar?
I tried every technique I know to try and capture the page element somehow, which led to nothing. Then took a snapshot of the browser with Playwright, and the button wasn't even there. Also tried just saving the instance of the browser to open locally, and this ghost button would not appear at all. It's some anti-detection measure that is not happening on the page level but on some sort of GPU level since google owns the entire browser and has the ability to implement these kind of measures while another website wouldn't.
Hard to find any resources online about any sort of GPU-layer detection. First pic shows what playwright captured. Ignore the red outline, I was just trying to see if I can query for "search" and try to outline it somehow. Second pic shows pic taken from my phone camera (lol).
Thought you guys might find this interesting. Anyone encounter something similar?
