At the moment, all documentation for createBrowserFetcher and BrowserFetcher stands removed. I haven't been following the development of puppeteer, so don't know what happened. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I needed to download chromium manually, and came upon some answers mentioning createBrowserFetcher. But when I looked up the docs, I didn't find it. I know it existed as some point because I can see questions about it, but the page for it doesn't exist in the website.
As it stands currently, it has been removed from Puppeteer. All I want to know why it was removed, when, and are there any alternatives. If anyone can point me to relevant issues, PRs, questions, answers, it will help a lot.
It looks like the first step was using new BrowserFetcher directly instead of the createBrowserFetcher wrapper. This was released in 19.0.0.
Later, it looks like the maintainers decided to break browser fetching out to a separate package: @puppeteer/browsers, initially released 2023/2/22.
From PR #9647:
This PR introduces a new package that is the refactored version of the BrowserFetcher.
The new package will encapsulate all the Node-specific code related to the launching/downloading of the browsers (the code that is currently in the node folder of puppeteer-core). It will also simplify and unify the workflow to support more browsers. This PR implements two functions
fetchandcanFetch.
Subsequent PRs fleshed out the new package, and #10107 removed the BrowserFetcher namespace from Puppeteer. Additional PRs like #10129 removed BrowserFetcher from the docs and pointed the links to the new package.