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.
This build is ad-hoc signed but not Apple-notarized. On first launch, right-click Headless Guard.app and choose Open. Verify the archive with SHA256SUMS.txt.
Read the safety model before enabling automatic cleanup.