Using impit along with header-generator

[garysassano]

It's unclear to me whether impit is designed to be used with or without the header-generator. I've always used them together, but I also noticed that impit already generates Sec- headers on its own as part of its browser impersonation logic. This makes me wonder if combining it with header-generator is actually redundant—or potentially counterproductive—since it might override impit's built-in behavior. It might be helpful to clarify this in the documentation.

[barjin]

Hello, and thank you for your consistent interest in this project!

Indeed, impit is a self-sufficient solution for impersonating browsers, and using other packages with it is unnecessary.

It might even hurt your fingerprint credibility: by generating a randomized header set with e.g. header-generator, you might overwrite impit's internal headers (captured together with a TLS fingerprint from a specific browser version). This might cause a discrepancy between e.g. the JA4 fingerprint (that tracks the TLS handshake settings) and the JA4H fingerprint (that tracks the HTTP headers, version, sent cookies etc.)

You have a good point, we definitely might want to mention this in the README for the JS bindings for impit. Feel free to open an issue (or even shoot us a PR). Cheers!

[garysassano]

It might even hurt your fingerprint credibility: by generating a randomized header set with e.g. header-generator, you might overwrite impit's internal headers (captured together with a TLS fingerprint from a specific browser version). This might cause a discrepancy between e.g. the JA4 fingerprint (that tracks the TLS handshake settings) and the JA4H fingerprint (that tracks the HTTP headers, version, sent cookies etc.)

That's exactly what I suspected, hence the question.

Btw, as I understand it, impit simply makes raw HTTP requests—it's not an actual slim web browser like happy-dom. So it wouldn't work for websites that rely on JavaScript to render content. Is that correct?

[barjin]

Yes, that is correct. impit is an HTTP client, much like undici (the backend for Node's native fetch). You can download the webpage's HTML markup, but if the page relies on JS to render content, you'd be missing all dynamically loaded content from there.