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Cloudflare Browser Isolation (BISO)

Browser Isolation (BISO) is Cloudflare's remote-browser product within the Zero Trust portfolio: a tenant's user opens a URL, the page renders in a Cloudflare-hosted Chromium instance, and only sanitised draw commands are streamed to the user's local browser — never the underlying page bytes. Marketed at cloudflare.com — What is browser isolation?.

The wiki canonicalises BISO primarily as the shared-browser substrate that Browser Run ran on top of through 2025–early 2026, before Browser Run was migrated off BISO and onto Cloudflare Containers in 2026-05-13.

Workload-shape contrast with Browser Run

The 2026-05-13 Browser Run migration post canonicalises three mismatches that made BISO the wrong shared substrate for Browser Run (Source: sources/2026-05-13-cloudflare-browser-run-now-running-on-cloudflare-containers-its-faster):

Property BISO Browser Run
Image size Larger (full Chromium + isolation surface) Smaller (slimmer image)
Global distribution Limited POP footprint Wants every POP for low-latency programmatic use
Session shape Long, steady (a user's workday browsing) Short, spiky (per-screenshot / per-render burst)
Capacity planning Steady-state peak Spiky / agent-driven volatility

Verbatim from the post: "BISO's larger container images slowed startup and development. Crucially, BISO browsers lacked optimal global distribution, compromising resiliency and latency. Additionally, typical BISO users' long, steady sessions clashed with Browser Run's short, spiky usage, creating scaling bottlenecks and availability delays."

Image-cadence coupling problem

Verbatim: "When our browsers ran on shared product infrastructure, upgrading Chrome meant coordinating across multiple teams and products, each with their own roadmap and priorities." With Browser Run on the BISO image, browser-feature shipping was gated on BISO's release cadence. Migrating to Browser-Run-owned images on Cloudflare Containers unblocked WebGL + WebMCP (Model Context Protocol for the web) — both shipped in the same 2026-05-13 post.

Seen in

  • sources/2026-05-13-cloudflare-browser-run-now-running-on-cloudflare-containers-its-faster — canonical wiki instance of BISO as the prior shared substrate for Browser Run, with the three workload-shape mismatches enumerated and the image-cadence coupling attributed as the structural blocker for browser-tier feature shipping. The migration off BISO is the canonical "shared infra is cheaper until your workload shape diverges from the shared shape" failure mode on the wiki.
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