Obscura is a headless browser engine written from scratch in Rust. It embeds V8 and speaks the Chrome DevTools Protocol, so Puppeteer and Playwright scripts connect by changing one endpoint, and it ships an MCP server with 37 tools. The headline numbers (about 30 MB per process, about 85 ms per page load) come from the project's own benchmarks; it passes 83.3% of its core WPT subtests, and long-tail CSS and some Web APIs still differ from Chromium.
It's really a two-way choice now: @playwright/mcp (cross-browser, accessibility tree, token-cheap) versus chrome-devtools-mcp (Chrome's official server, performance and memory diagnostics). @modelcontextprotocol/server-puppeteer has been archived and is no longer a candidate. The dividing line is no longer abstraction level — it's 'drive the page' versus 'diagnose Chrome'.
chrome-devtools-mcp, maintained by the Chrome team, packages DevTools capability as an MCP server: performance traces and insights, Lighthouse audits, heap snapshots, extension management — none of which @playwright/mcp exposes. It runs on Puppeteer, so interactions auto-wait; the costs are Chrome-only support and usage statistics reported to Google by default.