selenium stealth unmaintained

selenium-stealth hasn't been updated since December 2021

selenium-stealth is effectively unmaintained: its repository's last commit is from December 2021. The JavaScript patches it applies still execute, but the list of automation-visible properties it covers stopped growing in late 2021, while the browser and the detection methods aimed at automation have moved through four-plus years of updates since. That widening gap, not a broken install, is what its continued presence in current tutorials obscures.

Search for how to stop Selenium from being detected and selenium-stealth still shows up on the first page of results, in tutorials dated well into 2026. The last commit being from December 2021 is not a minor detail buried in a changelog - it's the single fact that changes how much weight the rest of the advice deserves.

What it patches, and why that part still runs fine

selenium-stealth does the same class of thing puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth does on the Node side: apply a set of JavaScript overrides through Chrome DevTools Protocol before the page's own scripts run, so a handful of automation-visible properties answer the way a real Chrome's would. User agent, languages, platform, vendor, renderer, a few others. Straightforward, and none of that logic has any reason to stop functioning just because nobody's committed to the repository lately - the patches that exist still apply the same way they did in 2021.

What four and a half years of silence actually costs

The cost isn't in the patches that exist. It's in the ones that don't.

Chrome has shipped roughly four and a half years of version updates since this package's last commit. Detection services have shipped that many update cycles too, and they've spent them looking at exactly the kind of automation traffic this package produces. A property list frozen in late 2021 was written against the Chrome and CDP surface of that year. Neither stayed still.

Concretely, this shows up as a widening gap between "the properties this package patches" and "the properties something checks today." The package's whole value proposition is that list, and the list stopped growing while the thing it's measured against kept moving. That's true regardless of whether any individual 2021-era patch technically still executes without error.

The same ceiling as everything else in this category, just older

Separate from the staleness question, selenium-stealth shares the same structural limit as playwright-stealth and puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth: every property it changes is overwritten from the page, after the browser's real value already existed and after the automation protocol already connected. That overwrite is its own signal - a native-looking Function.prototype.toString check or a descriptor-shape check catches an overwritten property regardless of what value it now reports. And CDP's own presence, the automation protocol Selenium and CDP-based tools rely on to run these patches in the first place, is a signal these patches were never designed to hide.

An actively maintained version of the same approach would still have this ceiling. The staleness makes the practical gap wider today; it isn't the whole story.

What to check if you're relying on this today

1. Check the repository, not the package's continued presence in tutorials. Popularity in search results says nothing about whether a project is maintained - check the commit history directly.
2. Test the actual properties you depend on, against a current version of the browser you're driving, rather than trusting that a 2021-era patch list still matches a 2026 detection surface.
3. If Chrome-based automation with active maintenance is the goal, that's a separate question from whether this specific package is still receiving updates - the two shouldn't be conflated just because they're often mentioned together.

Short answers to the questions that lead here

Is selenium-stealth still maintained? Its repository's last commit is from December 2021. It has not received meaningful ongoing development since.

Does selenium-stealth still work? The specific patches it applies still execute. Whether they're sufficient against a given detector in 2026 is a separate, unrelated question its continued execution doesn't answer.

Why do tutorials still recommend it? Search content has a long tail, and a package that worked well when a tutorial was written doesn't get automatically flagged as outdated when the tutorial keeps ranking. The repository itself is the only reliable source for whether something is still developed.

Is this specific to Selenium, or does it apply elsewhere? The staleness is specific to this package. The architectural ceiling - page-level property patching being detectable through the overwrite itself, and never touching anything below the JavaScript layer - is the same one covered for the Puppeteer and Playwright versions of this approach.

See also: what the $cdc_ variable actually is and why renaming it isn't the whole fix, the Selenium-specific detection surface this package's property patches sit next to, and puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth hasn't shipped a real update since 2024, the same pattern on a different driver.

Sources

• The package's own public repository and commit history, checked directly rather than inferred from its continued presence in current tutorials and answers.

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From the notes of invisible_playwright, a Firefox patched at the C++ level, on why a patch list's age matters independently of whether the patches still technically run.