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+---
+title: "Bumblebee: browser automation"
+date: 2025-04-02
+layout: post
+project: true
+thumbnail: thumb_sm.png
+---
+
+Bumblebee is a tool I built for one of my employers to automate the generation
+of web scraping scripts.
+
+<video style="max-width:100%; margin-bottom: 10px" controls="" poster="poster.png">
+  <source src="bee.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+</video>
+
+In 2024, we were tasked with collecting market data using various methods,
+including scraping data from authorized websites for traders' use.
+
+Manual authoring of such scripts took time. The scripts were often brittle due
+to the complexity of the modern web, and they lacked optimizations such as
+bypassing the UI and retrieving the data files directly when possible, which
+would have significantly reduced our compute costs.
+
+To alleviate these challenges, I, with the help of a colleague, Andy Zhang,
+built Bumblebee: a web browser powered by C# Windows Forms, Microsoft Edge <a
+src="https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2"
+class="external" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">WebView2</a>, and
+the <a src="https://github.com/desjarlais/Scintilla.NET" class="external"
+toarget="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Scintilla.NET</a> text editor.
+
+Bumblebee works by injecting a custom JavaScript program that intercepts
+client-side events and sends them to Bumblebee for analysis. In addition to
+front-end events, Bumblebee also captures internal browser events, which it
+then interprets to generate code in real time. Note that we developed Bumblebee
+before the advent of now-popular LLMs. Bumblebee supports dynamic websites,
+pop-ups, developer tools, live manual override, event debouncing, and filtering
+hidden elements and scripts.
+
+Before settling on a desktop application, we contemplated designing Bumblebee
+as a browser extension. We chose the desktop app because extensions don't offer
+the deep, event-based control we needed. Besides, the company's security
+policy, which prohibited browser extensions, would have complicated the
+deployment of an extension-based solution. My first prototype used a C# binding
+of the Chromium project. WebView's more intuitive API and its seamless
+integration with Windows Forms led us to choose it over the Chromium wrapper.
+
+What began as a personal side project to improve my own workflow enabled us to
+collectively improve the quality of our web scripts at a much larger scale.
+Bumblebee predictably reduced the time we spent on authoring scripts from hours
+to a few minutes.
+