Camoufox in production: 63.4% of downloads run an old version

Camoufox is one of the tools developers try after the stealth plugins stop working, and for a reason: it changes the browser itself rather than patching values from inside the page. Running it for one scraping job and running it behind an agent that signs in to the same accounts every day are different questions, though. We read its documentation, its issue tracker and its download statistics on 24 September 2026 to answer the second one.

What is Camoufox?

Camoufox is a Firefox build with fingerprint patches in its C++ source, used through Playwright. Its homepage explains that it "is built on top of Firefox instead of Chromium" and that it "works with your existing Playwright code out of the box". The project is published under the MPL-2.0 licence, and its GitHub repository had 12,113 stars on the day we read it.

What does Camoufox do well?

Camoufox does three things well that most free stealth tools do not. The list is in order of how much each one matters for detection.

• It patches the browser, not the page. Values are changed in the engine, so there is no injected script for a page to find.
• It holds its own against Chromium tools. In Ian L. Paterson's benchmark of 7 tools against 31 targets, published in May 2026, Camoufox reached 25 targets without a block or a challenge, the same as Patchright and one more than vanilla Playwright.
• It is maintained. Version 0.5.6 appeared on PyPI on 6 September 2026, the fourth release since mid-July.

Why is a new device every session a signal?

A new device every session is a signal because a returning visitor normally comes back on the same machine, and Camoufox, by default, does not. Its usage documentation states that when no fingerprint is passed, "BrowserForge is used to generate unique fingerprints". A persistent context keeps cookies and local storage, but an open issue from January 2026 describes what happens on the next launch with the same profile directory: the canvas, WebGL and audio noise seeds are regenerated, navigator.hardwareConcurrency drifts "16 -> 12 -> 14", and the GPU renderer string "often switch[es] between different mocked vendors".

For a scraper that visits a site once, a fresh device is harmless. For an agent that keeps an account signed in, it is the opposite of what the account's history expects: the cookies say the visitor is known, the device says it is new. Camoufox can be given a preset fingerprint instead of a generated one, but the open issue asks for exactly what is still missing: noise seeds and hardware values that stay the same from one launch to the next.

Which version are people actually running?

Most installs run an old version. We read the version distribution that pepy.tech computes from PyPI download logs over the last 90 days.

Two cautions keep this table honest. The figures include CI traffic, so pinned build pipelines count as heavily as people. And 0.5.6 had existed for only 18 of the 90 days, so its share will grow. Still, nearly two thirds of the downloads in this window installed a version from January 2025, so most of these installs run patches that are 20 months old.

How does CloakBrowser compare as a Chromium option?

On Chromium, CloakBrowser takes the same approach: source-level patches, a Playwright-compatible wrapper and a new random fingerprint seed at every launch unless a seed is passed. Its README lists 87 C++ patches, and it reached 26 of 31 targets in the same benchmark. It presents a Chrome identity where Camoufox presents Firefox, and it shares the default that makes both awkward for a long-lived account: a fresh device per launch.

So which should you pick?

Our verdict: Camoufox patches the browser rather than the page, costs nothing and is maintained, and it fits work that does not need to come back as the same visitor. For an agent that keeps accounts, the per-launch device is the gap to watch until issue 442 is closed, and the version should be kept current. If you are moving existing automation elsewhere, the migration guide shows how to attach it to a profile over CDP.