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Headless Guard for Mac

Finds and stops orphaned automation browsers before they hijack Chrome launches or silently drain resources.

By study8677. Free and open source, MIT licence.

Get it with OpenDMG View source on GitHub

Headless Guard at a glance

Version
0.1.0
Released
2 August 2026
Download size
2.0 MB
Works on
Apple silicon
Licence
MIT
Category
Utilities
Developer
study8677
GitHub stars
2

About Headless Guard

A native macOS utility that safely finds and stops orphaned headless browsers without touching your normal Chrome session.

Screenshots

Headless Guard screenshot 1

How to install Headless Guard on a Mac

  1. Get OpenDMG. It is a free app store for open source Mac apps. Download OpenDMG.
  2. Search for Headless Guard and press Get. OpenDMG downloads version 0.1.0 from study8677's own GitHub release.
  3. Open it. The download is checked against its SHA-256 fingerprint and its signature is checked on your Mac before it lands in Applications.

Updates to Headless Guard show up in OpenDMG and install with one button. No account is needed.

Prefer to do it by hand? The developer's file is on GitHub: HeadlessGuard-v0.1.0-macOS-arm64.zip (2.0 MB).

What is new in Headless Guard 0.1.0

## Headless Guard 0.1.0

The first public release of Headless Guard: a native macOS app and CLI for finding and safely stopping orphaned automation browsers without touching ordinary Chrome sessions.

### Added

- Native SwiftUI dashboard and menu bar status.
- Explainable process-tree detection for Playwright, Puppeteer, Rod, WebDriver, and Selenium fingerprints.
- Hard protection for normal browser windows, standard profiles, extensions, and unrelated workers.
- Safe cleanup state machine: re-scan, stop the dedicated launcher first, TERM, revalidate, then KILL matching survivors only.
- CLI scan, JSON, dry-run rescue, watch, and doctor commands.
- Opt-in stale-orphan policy and launch-at-login control.
- Structured false-positive and missed-detection reporting.

### Verified recovery

The release was exercised against a real Playwright daemon and system Chrome tree left alive for more than two days. It identified seven related processes at 100/100 confidence, stopped only that automation tree, reclaimed about 365 MB at cleanup time, saw no classified revival over 15 seconds, and preserved the existing normal Chrome PID.

### Download

`HeadlessGuard-v0.1.0-macOS-arm64.zip` targets Apple Silicon and requires macOS 13 or later.
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