Why Blowhorn uses your own Chrome
Signed-in Chrome through the extension, APIs where they exist, and never headless.
Why Blowhorn uses your own Chrome
Platforms trust people, not programs. A post that arrives from a browser you signed in to, carrying your session, your history, and your ordinary behavior, reads as you. A post from a datacenter browser that never slept reads as automation. Blowhorn therefore acts in the Chrome you already use, and reaches for an API only where the platform offers one it can honestly use.
The extension drives your signed-in Chrome: the tabs you have open, on the sites Blowhorn acts on, with the sessions you made by hand. There is no second browser to sign in to, no session to export, and nothing that rots when a cookie expires except the session itself, which you renew by signing in again. Scheduled passes drive the same Chrome through the same extension; an unattended run never waits for a person at a sign-in or a challenge, it stops and says so.
Slack, Bluesky, and GitHub post through their APIs above the browser, because those calls carry a token, not a pretense. Everything else drives Chrome, because anything else would be a poorer copy of you.
Chrome is never launched headless, and never swapped for bundled Chromium. A headless Chrome announces itself in every request while its hints still claim Google Chrome, and the bundled build announces itself in both. Either would mark the run as automation to every site it touches. An unattended run takes the minimized background window instead: invisible, but honest about what it is.
What a site sees is therefore your own user agent, your own session, and input delivered as real keystrokes and clicks with human pauses between them. That honesty is also the limit: a CAPTCHA or a second-factor challenge hands back to you, always, because passing it for you would stop being you.
Related
- Chrome reference - launch modes and the extension default.
- Chrome extension permissions - what the extension may do.
- Platforms - which platforms drive Chrome and which use APIs.
- How Blowhorn paces itself - human pauses between actions.
- Map Blowhorn profiles to Chrome profiles - the Chrome half of setup.