#9·skills

stealth-extract fails on Windows 10: SessionDriverKernelStartFailedError (v1.0.0)

Author: iloveyou1955Created Jul 1, 2026Updated Aug 26, 2026

Environment

  • OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
  • Installation: uv tool install browser-act-cli --python 3.12
  • Version: browser-act-cli v1.0.0
  • Python: Python 3.14.3

Bug Description

Running any browser-act stealth-extract command on Windows 10 fails immediately with:

Error 230404: Browser launch failed: Failed to obtain machine code for windows
(raw: SessionDriverKernelStartFailedError)

Steps to Reproduce

browser-act stealth-extract https://httpbin.org/headers

Observed Behavior

The command exits with error code 230404. The error message indicates the stealth browser's anti-detection kernel driver cannot start on this Windows system. This completely blocks stealth-extract — the core feature for lightweight anti-bot content extraction without creating a browser session.

Expected Behavior

stealth-extract should work on Windows 10, or at minimum:

  1. Fall back to a non-kernel-driver approach when the driver is unavailable
  2. Provide clear documentation about Windows driver prerequisites (driver signing, required Windows features, etc.)
  3. Give a more actionable error message suggesting how to resolve the issue

Impact

Without stealth-extract working on Windows, the only remaining content extraction paths require creating a browser session (chrome/chrome-direct/stealth) with Confirmation Gate, which is much heavier than a simple fetch. This significantly reduces the tool's value for Windows users.

Additional Context

  • Clean Windows 10 install, no special security software
  • Fresh uv tool install browser-act-cli --python 3.12
  • Other commands (get-skills, --help, --version) work fine
  • Chrome browser itself runs normally on this system