ShardX (optional plugin)

ShardX is ProxyShard’s anti-detect browser. On Akamai-protected sites it was the strongest single browser we tested, and several times faster than Frankensurf climbing its own ladder to the same pages. It isn’t part of Frankensurf: it comes as a separate plugin, contrib/frankensurf-shardx, that you install and trust yourself.

Closed source

ShardX’s engine is a prebuilt Chromium that the shardx SDK downloads from the vendor the first time it starts. Its source isn’t published, so nobody outside ProxyShard can check what it does. Like any plugin it runs with your permissions, and it can see every page it reads. We only ever ran it on a throwaway machine with no keys or logins. Decide for yourself before trusting it, and consider a separate user or a VM.

Set up

1. Install the plugin. It pins shardx==2.0.3, the version we benchmarked, and installs Playwright to drive it:

   pip install "frankensurf-shardx @ git+https://github.com/yail259/frankensurf#subdirectory=contrib/frankensurf-shardx"

2. Trust it. Until you do, Frankensurf loads it but never runs it:

   frankensurf plugins trust provider shardx frankensurf-shardx
   frankensurf plugins            # shardx should be under "loaded"

3. Read with it. The first read downloads ShardX’s browser and starts it; later reads in the same session reuse it.

To stop using it: frankensurf plugins untrust provider shardx, then pip uninstall frankensurf-shardx.

Use it

Once trusted, it joins automatic reads after the bundled tools, and Frankensurf learns from your reads which walls it gets past. To try it first on a site you know is behind Akamai, name it:

Python

page = await web.read("https://www.example.com/search?q=lamp", provider="shardx")

CLI

frankensurf read "https://www.example.com/search?q=lamp" --provider shardx

MCP

{ "tool": "read", "arguments": { "url": "https://www.example.com/search?q=lamp", "provider": "shardx" } }

Or put it early on the completeness ladder, so it’s tried as soon as a cheap read comes back incomplete: completeness_ladder=("jina_reader", "shardx", "scrapling", ...).

It opens a window by default. On Linux with no display it runs headless; set FRANKENSURF_SHARDX_HEADLESS=1 to force that, or FRANKENSURF_SHARDX_HEADED=1 to always show the window. The benchmarks below ran with a window, under a virtual display.

How it did

One read per tool per site, same pass/fail check as every other benchmark, on a throwaway GitHub machine. Raw rows: benchmarks/2026-10-14-shardx.

18 Akamai-protected sites (46 retail search pages listed first, kept only where Akamai answered):

Tool	Read right	Median
Frankensurf, free tools	15/18	25.0 s
ShardX	11/18	5.4 s
Camoufox	6/18	6.2 s
Scrapling	5/18	4.2 s

150 sites picked blind: ShardX 69.3%, Scrapling 64.0%, Camoufox 62.7%. Frankensurf with free tools read 81.3% of the same set the day before: site by site, ShardX read 3 that Frankensurf missed, and Frankensurf read 21 that ShardX missed.

So it doesn’t add many sites Frankensurf can’t already read. What it adds is speed on Akamai: about 5 s a page where Frankensurf’s own climb took 25.

Details

Property	Value
Provider ID	shardx
Package	frankensurf-shardx (not on PyPI; install from the repository)
Cost	Free
Source	Plugin open source; ShardX engine closed
Tested	Live on a throwaway machine (14 Oct 2026); plugin tests with ShardX faked
Docs	github.com/ProxyShard/ShardBrowser