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MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• miguelspizza 1y ago
  Hey HN, This was an idea I had while trying to build MCP servers internally at Amazon. Today I am open sourcing it. TLDR it's an extension of the Model Context Protocol which allows you to treat your website as an MCP server which can be discovered and called by MCP-B compliant web extensions. You can read a more detailed and breakdown here (with gifs): https://mcp-b.ai/blogs https://mcp-b.ai/blogs
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Oh and the code is here: https://github.com/MiguelsPizza/WebMCP https://github.com/MiguelsPizza/WebMCP
• handfuloflight 1y ago
  Would it be possible to do this with any arbitrary website since we can execute JS client side?
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Yup! You just declare a standard MCP server and attach a TabServerTransport to it. Any TabClientTransport in the same Tab will be able to connect to it. The examples focus mostly on extensions injecting clients at website load time, but you can ship a client with your server javascript. That being said, if the client and server live in the the same script I recommend just using the InMemoryTransports from the official SDK.
    • imcritic 1y ago
      Wouldn't sites be able to detect presence of scripts injected by your extension (to, say, refuse you services since site owner decided they would like their site to be used only by humans, not AI agents)?
      • miguelspizza 1y ago
        Sure. Although I'd assume if the website owner went through the hassle of creating a MCP server for their website, they would probably want to be discovered
        • handfuloflight 1y ago
          We mean if we could use this to instantiate an MCP for any website we're visiting.
          • miguelspizza 1y ago
            Yea, I am planning a dev build of MCP-B which has access to user scripts apis. So technically you could `vibe code` and inject an MCP server into the target webpage
            • TeMPOraL 1y ago
              In the long run (well, mid-run), it'll be about the only way in which it'll be useful: toying with MCPs is all the rage now, but that'll end once business people pause and think for five seconds about what MCP actually does. Which is, provide users with ability to use a service the way they like, not the way the service owners likes, and avoiding interacting with the service directly. Or, in other words, it helps users get around all the bullshit that actually makes money for the business. Ads, upsells, cross-marketing opportunities. Engagement. LLMs help users avoid all that, and adding an MCP to your site makes it trivial for them. Maybe I'm too cynical, but think about this: the technologies we needed for this level of automation became ubiquitous decades ago. This was, after all, also the original hype behind APIs, that burned bright on the web for a year or two - before everyone realized that letting people interact with webservices the way they want is bad for business, and everything closed down behind contracts backed by strong auth. Instead of User Agents connecting diverse resources of the web for the benefit of users, we got... Zapier. That's what the future of service-side MCPs on the web is. But user scripts were always a way to let at least power users show a middle finger to "attention economy" and force some ergonomy out of web apps that desperately try to make users waste time. Giving users the ability to turn any website into MCP, regardless of whether that website wants it, will supercharge this. So for better or worse, that's where the future is. Adversarial interoperability remains the name of the game.
  • gavmor 1y ago
    Yeah, I am tempted to rig up a "generic" webpage MCP injected via greasemonkey just so I can use this UI for navigating the web.
• orliesaurus 1y ago
  I don't get it from the homepage, feels like Selenium on the browser, since you built it can you explain ?
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Similar but also very different. Playwright and Selenium are browser automation frameworks. There is a Playwright-MCP server which let's your agent use Playwright for browser automation. MCP-B is a different approach. Website owners create MCP servers `inside` their websites, and MCP-B clients are either injected by browser extensions or included in the websites JS. Instead of visual parsing like Playwright, you get standard deterministic function calls. You can see the blog post for code examples: https://mcp-b.ai/blogs https://mcp-b.ai/blogs
    • c0wb0yc0d3r 1y ago
      What differentiates this from something like data-test-id attributes?
      • miguelspizza 1y ago
        data-test-id attributes and other attributes are hardcoded and need to be know by the automator at run time. MCP-B clients request what they can call at injection time and the server responds with standard MCP tools. (functions LLM's can call with context for how to call them)
    • mhio 1y ago
      A playright-mcp server, or any bidi browser automation, should be equally capable of discovering/injecting and calling the same client JS exposed MCP-B site API? It's like an OpenAPI definition but for JS/MCP? (outside of the extension to interact with that definition)
      • miguelspizza 1y ago
        Sure they can inject clients, but that's really only beneficials for developers. doing it via browser extension means regular people can use it. > It's like an OpenAPI definition but for JS/MCP? Sortof. It's a true MCP server which you can use to expose existing (or new functionality on your webapp to the client)
• throwanem 1y ago
  > If I asked you to build a table and gave you a Home Depot you probably would have a harder time than if I gave you a saw, a hammer and some nails. I doubt that, first and not least because Home Depot stocks lumber.
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Fixed. Nice catch
    • throwanem 1y ago
      Well, I've built tables before.
  • bobmcnamara 1y ago
    Home Depot also sells tables.
    • devoutsalsa 1y ago
      Haha, that’s pretty close to any software I’ve ever written. Suck in a ton of open source dependencies, write comparatively little, and say “look what I made!” Buying a table, adorning it with vase of fake flowers, and claiming to be a Senior Woodworking Engineer sounds about right. I’ll be a Principal after buying a new bed frame & putting a mattress on it.
      • sneak 1y ago
        Wait until you find out that lumber doesn’t grow on trees like that. It’s manufacturing all the way down. Don’t sell yourself short.
    • stuartjohnson12 1y ago
      import table table()
    • throwanem 1y ago
      Not good ones. But in any case the spec was not to provide a table, was it?
• rapind 1y ago
  This looks great. I'd really like to add something like this to my application (public and admin side). I have users, especially on the admin side, that could really benefit.
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Thanks! I'd be happy to help onboard. Let me know!
• Flux159 1y ago
  This is an interesting take since web developers could add mcp tools into their apps rather than having browser agents having to figure out how to perform actions manually. Is the extension itself open source? Or only the extension-tools? In theory I should be able to write a chrome extension for any website to expose my own custom tools on that site right (with some reverse engineering of their APIs I assume)?
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    The extension should be open source. I had it as a private submodule until today. Let me figure out my it's not showing up and get back to you. The extension itself is a MCP server which can be connected to by other extension over cross extension messaging. Since the extension is part of the protocol, I'd like for the community to pull from the same important parts of the extension (MCPHub, content script) so they are consistent across extension implementations.
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Ok it's open source now
    • Flux159 1y ago
      Thanks! Took a very quick look. It seems like the extension exposes tools for all domains that support mcp-b looking at DomainToolManager - does this mean if I have two tabs for a single domain you'll have duplicate tools per tab? Haven't had enough time to look through all the code there - interesting problem I guess since a single domain could have multiple accounts connected (ex: gmail w/ account 0 vs account 1 in different tabs) or just a single account (ex: HN).
      • miguelspizza 1y ago
        No there is built in tool de-duping. I'm not sure how to handle domains with different url states though. Like you said there are some edge cases where two tabs of the same website expose different tool sets or have tools of the same name but would result in different outcomes when called. Curios if you have any thoughts on how to handle this
• fzysingularity 1y ago
  The contributions for the Github project is quite intriguing: https://github.com/MiguelsPizza/WebMCP/graphs/contributors https://github.com/MiguelsPizza/WebMCP/graphs/contributors MiguelsPizza | 3 commits | 89++ | 410-- claude | 2 commits | 31,799++ | 0--
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    I did some git history re-visioning when I closed sourced the extension for a bit. So these are not super accurate. Claude code did write about 85% of the code though.
    • fzysingularity 1y ago
      Nice!
      • rapind 1y ago
        I was checking that out too. Looks like claude was co-author on the initial commit, which is like 90%. https://github.com/MiguelsPizza/WebMCP/commit/26ec4a75354b1c4c99eb7c7b0f7350d84aece46f https://github.com/MiguelsPizza/WebMCP/commit/26ec4a75354b1c...
        • csomar 1y ago
          The main author doesn't have a GitHub account or un-linked his account (on purpose or by accident).
          • miguelspizza 1y ago
            Looks like Claude put me down as a co-author with my real name (Alex Nahas) instead of my GitHub handle (MiguelsPizza)
    • Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
      How can you figure out that percentage? The commit logs?
• TechDebtDevin 1y ago
  hmm, I have an MCP route, that fetches the page in a browser, returns and lets the LLM inject javascript onto the page to return whatever structured output it desires..Or whatever (kinda scarily). How is this different? --Shoutout to Go-Rod https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-rod/rod@v0.116.2#Page https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-rod/rod@v0.116.2#Page
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Cool, I'll check it out! I'll need to look a bit more, but at a glance, MCP-B is more putting the onus of browser automation (i.e. how the agent will interact with the web page) on the website owner. They get to expose exactly the functionality they want to the agent
    • TechDebtDevin 1y ago
      Oh this is for the website owner. Yeah, mine is to make an arbitrary site interactable with an LLM. It can choose to get a map of the DOM/screenshot/extract by xml path/ and interact via a few different methods. But the PageEval() method from GO rod works pretty well Would like to just provide a runtime for an LLM to solve captchas. My main focus is (anti) bot detection.
• muratsu 1y ago
  This puts the burden on the website owner. If I go through the trouble of creating and publishing an MCP server for my website, I assume that through some directory or method I'll be able to communicate that with consumers (browsers & other clients). It would be much more valuable for website owners if you can automate the MCP creation & maintenance.
  • rapind 1y ago
    I think this is the practical way. The website owner (or rather the builder, since if you're running wordpress, we can assume MCP will be part of the package) is already responsible for the human interface across many devices, and also the search engine interface (robots.txt, sitemap.xml, metatags). Having a standard we can use to curate what the AI sees and how it can interact would be hugely beneficial. There's space for both IMO. The more generic tool that figures it out on it's own, and the streamlined tool that accesses a site's guiderails. There's also the backend service of course which doesn't require the browser or UI, but as he describes this entails complexity around authentication and I would assume discoverability.
    • muratsu 1y ago
      I agree with you that platforms like wordpress, shopify etc will likely ship MCP extensions to help with various use cases. Accompanied with a discovery standard similar to llms.txt, I think it will be beneficial too. My only argument is that platforms like this are also the most "templated" designs and it's already easy for AI to navigate them (since dom structure variance is small). The bigger challenge I think is figuring out how to build MCPs easily for SaaS and other legacy portals. I see some push on the OpenAPI side of things which is promising but requires you to make significant changes to existing apps. Perhaps web frameworks (rails, next, laravel, etc) can agree on a standard.
      • sbarre 1y ago
        > it's already easy for AI to navigate them (since dom structure variance is small). The premise of MCP-B is that it's in fact not easy to reliably navigate websites today with LLMs, if you're just relying on DOM traversal or computer vision. And when it comes to authenticated and read/write operations, I think you need the reliability and control that comes from something like MCP-B, rather than just trusting the LLM to figure it out. Both Wordpress and Shopify allow users to heavily customize their front-end, and therefore ship garbage HTML + CSS if they choose to (or don't know any better). I certainly wouldn't want to rely on LLMs parsing arbitrary HTML if I'm trying to automate a purchase or some other activity that involves trust and/or sensitive data.
• assanineass 1y ago
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• ethanniser 1y ago
  this is super cool wonder if it was inspired by `broadcast-mcp` [1] (hackathon project by me and a friend from may based on the same concept but not fleshed out) 1: https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/1923956444153643443 https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/1923956444153643443
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Ah no, first time seeing this. How were you interacting with the website server? Via extension or some way else?
    • ethanniser 1y ago
      we would open the mcp site in a new tab or iframe then had a custom mcp transport based on `window.postMessage` just like you do https://github.com/RhysSullivan/broadcast-mcp/blob/main/package/src/transport.ts https://github.com/RhysSullivan/broadcast-mcp/blob/main/pack... this concept is awesome- glad someone really fleshed it out
• metta2uall 1y ago
  Looks great. I love ideas that increase efficiency and reduce electricity usage. Only nitpick is that the home page says "cross-browser" at the bottom but the extension is only available for Chrome..
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Ah yea I'll fix that. Nice catch
• ActorNightly 1y ago
  This MCP stuff is leading dev down the wrong path. We should be focusing on llms using self discovery to figure out information.
  • teruakohatu 1y ago
    I had that opinion too. You can ask an agent to browse a web page and click a button etc. They will work out how to use a browser automation library. But it’s not worth the cost, time spent waiting or the inconsistency between implementations. MCP just offloads that overload, much like how they can use bash tools when they are quite capable of writing an implementation of grep etc.
    • ActorNightly 1y ago
      The whole point is that you shouldn't have to worry about implementation. AI should do it for you.
      • johschmitz 1y ago
        At the end of the day you often need to consider the energy efficiency of a system which is also reflected in the cost of operating it. For use cases where this is relevant the suggested MCP approach potentially offers large benefits compared to what's probably meant here by "AI". However, the disadvantages of public access discussed in other threads need to be considered as well, therefore, I expected this only to be used for certain niche use cases. Testing and retro fitting non-public websites come to mind.
        • ActorNightly 1y ago
          Once we have the thing working, optimization can come later. Also MCP is not really optimal. Every prompt in a sequence of chat gets an injection of MCP capabilities. Its just simply not scalable with lots and lots of MCP servers. Not to mention the protocol changes every month and breaks things. Furthermore, you can already do MCP like behavior, in a better way, on pretty much any model by basically writing a wrapper around the chatbot and using a system prompt which guides it to print specific text (like "action:load file"), and the wrapper can detect that text and inject the prompt. I have an agent that runs at home using this, which I also use to self improve and define actions on the fly - I ask it to write code, it writes code, then the wrapper takes that code and makes it part of the library and appends it to the system prompt on every new chat. The point is that we should be able to take the latter, and build something that can do this automatically. Once we have the full loop complete, then we can optimize it down to minimum compute.
• roundrobins 1y ago
  It's not every day that I catch tomorrow's huge hit today on a random HN post. Better get ready to quit your day job and get funded buddy, as my 30 years worth of tech instincts tell me this will take off vertically!
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• SchemaLoad 1y ago
  Not sure who the intended user is here? For frontend testing you actually do somewhat want the tests to break when the UI changes in major ways. And for other automation you'd be better off providing an actual API to use.
  • nicman23 1y ago
    scrappers and me buying milk with a vlm
• ge96 1y ago
  Ultimate test for me, make me a payment system where I put in $1 and it gives me $2 back
• slt2021 1y ago
  Could all of this be replaced simply by publishing OpenAPI (Swagger) spec and using universal swagger mcp client ??? This basically leaves up to the user to establish authenticated session manually. Assuming claude is smart enough to pick up API key from prompt/config, and can use swagger based api client, wouldnt that be the same?
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • efitz 1y ago
    Do it.
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    That was everyone's first thought when MCP came out. Turns out it doesn't work too well since there is generally too many tools. People are doing interesting work in this space though
    • randomaifreak 1y ago
      Yeah agreed. Tool overload is quite problematic. And then having to interact with the api for each website and their tools and possibly clashing tool names isnt ideal.
  • nilslice 1y ago
    pls don't put an api key in a prompt
    • loandbehold 1y ago
      It may or may not be an issue. It's ok to give it API key for test/qa system but probably not for prod.
  • loandbehold 1y ago
    I found i can have Claude Code consume API just by giving it link to swagger.json in CLAUDE.md. it's very useful for adhoc testing.
• bpiroman 1y ago
  Vite ...
• mehdibl 1y ago
  From the blog post: "The Auth problem At this point, the auth issues with MCP are well known. OAuth2.1 is great, but we are basically trying to re-invent auth for agents that act on behalf of the user. This is a good long term goal, but we are quickly realizing that LLM sessions with no distinguishable credentials of their own are difficult to authorize and will require a complete re-imagining of our authorization systems. Data leakage in multi-tenant apps that have MCP servers is just not a solved problem yet. I think a very strong case for MCP is to limit the amount of damage the model can do and the amount of data it will ever have access to. The nice thing about client side APIs in multi-tenant apps is they are hopefully already scoped to the user. If we just give the model access to that, there's not much damage they can do. It's also worth mentioning that OAuth2.1 is basically incompatible with internal Auth at Amazon (where I work). I won't go to much into this, but the implications of this reach beyond Amazon internal." 1. Oauth is not working in Amazon ==> need solution. 2. Oauth are difficult to authorize 3. limit the amount of damage the model can do WHILE "ulti-tenant apps is they are hopefully already scoped to the user". I feel from a security side there is an issue here in this logic. Oauth for apps can be far more tuned than current web user permission as usually, user have modification permission, that you may not want to provide. Oauth not implemented in Amazon, is not really an issue. Also this means you backdoor the App with another APP you establish trust with it. ==> This is a major no go for security as all actions on MCP app will be logged in the same scope as USER access. You might just copy your session ID/ Cookie and do the same with an MCP. I may be wrong the idea seem intersting but from a security side, I feel it's a bypass that will have a lot of issues with compliance.
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Not sure I understand. The model has no more access than the user does. proper security implementation still lies with the website owner
    • tehryanx 1y ago
      I think the point is that you shouldn't be giving the agent the same privileges as the user. This is one of the biggest issues with how people are using agents rn imo. The agent should be treated as an untrusted user in your client, given restricted privileges scoped to only the exact access they need to perform a given task.
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• abrookewood 1y ago
  Looks similar to Elixir's Tidewave MCP server, which currently also supports Ruby: https://tidewave.ai/ https://tidewave.ai/ Paraphrasing: Connect your editor's assistant to your web framework runtime via MCP and augment your agentic workflows and chats with: Database integration; Logs and runtime introspection; Code evaluation; and Documentation context. Edit: Re-reading MCP-B docs, that is more geared towards allowing visitors to your site to use MCP, while Tidewave is definitely focussed on Developers.
• mupuff1234 1y ago
  I still don't understand MCP. If according to all the AI companies soon AI will replace devs than why bother with MCP?
  • qayxc 1y ago
    Lock-in. LLMs are today's hammer: everything looks like a nail now. LLMs are super useful for certain tasks (generating boilerplate code, generating tests, providing examples for API usage, summarising etc.), but the demo to me just illustrates a solution in desperate search for a problem. "Create A TODO" using a chatbot? That's an example gone wrong in so many ways and goes to show what happens if you start with a solution and work your way backwards to a use case without actually thinking about it yourself...
    • dominicrose 1y ago
      A todo list is already a productivity tool and not an essential one. When I hear about productivity I can't help but think "but be productive doing what?" What do we have to do that's so important we need AI, and not a chat AI but AI on steroids (supposedly)?
  • surrealistic 1y ago
    Because we're in the denial phase, doing expert systems all over again but this time on top of something that looks like NLP but isn't quite there.
  • tracerbulletx 1y ago
    It's pretty much standardizing on a couple endpoints for providing a list of resources/actions/prompt templates and calling to fetch those resources/actions/templates and feed them to the model context. It's really kind of trivial, but it's nice there's a standard I guess so you can write a service that anyone can use in their favorite client.
    • mupuff1234 1y ago
      I think that also known by another word - "documentation".
• netrem 1y ago
  The product seems interesting, but the landing page I found very chaotic and gave up reading it. The individual pieces of information are fine I think, but the flow is poor and some info repeats. Was it AI generated?
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Yes it was mostly AI generated. I'm much more of a dev than a writer/marketer. Hopefully if this gains some traction I can pay someone to clean it up
• cryptozeus 1y ago
  can someone explain like I am five?
  • lovelearning 1y ago
    A website owner can publish their website's capabilities or data as "tools". AI agents and LLMs like ChatGPT, in response to user prompts, can consult these tools to figure out their next actions. Example: 1. An author has a website for their self-published book. It currently checks book availability with their database when add to cart is clicked. 2. The website publishes "check book availability" and "add to cart" as "tools", using this MCP-B protocol. 3. A user instructs ChatGPT or some AI agent to "Buy 3 copies of author's book from https://theirbooksite https://theirbooksite" 4. The AI agent visits the site. Finds that it's MCP-B compliant. Using MCP-B, it gets the list of available tools. It finds a tool called "check book availability", and uses it to figure out if ordering 3 copies is possible. If yes, it'll next call "add to cart" tool on the website. The website here is actively cooperating with the agent/LLM and supplying structured data. Instead of being a passive collection of UI elements that AI chatbots have to figure out based on UI layouts or UI captions, which are generally very brittle approaches.
  • airtonix 1y ago
    [dead]
  • volkandkaya 1y ago
    Example: You have google docs and CMS open in 2 tabs 1. Ask to take your google doc and add it to the CMS 2. MCP tool takes the data from Google docs 3. MCP tool to convert text to CMS item 4. MCP tool to insert that CMS item With the above you can view unique UIs for each stage as well, such as generating a table with CMS fields before accepting.
• Abishek_Muthian 1y ago
  I’ve haven’t used any MCP so far but as a disabled person I see use cases in accessibility for MCPs doing browser/smartphone automation. But any accessibility tool will be exploited by nefarious actors so I wonder how many main stream websites/apps would implement these MCP. Has anyone tried any MCP for improving accessibility?
  • krashidov 1y ago
    > But any accessibility tool will be exploited by nefarious actors so I wonder how many main stream websites/apps would implement these MCP. How so?
    • mattlondon 1y ago
      Anything that makes it easier to automate will make bad actors more efficient. So people like ticket sales sites, eBay etc. It will make it easier for those sites to have all the tickets purchased or for auctions to be sniped etc. FWIU, these sort of sites actually (currently at least) put on measures to try and stop bots using them for these reasons.
      • sneak 1y ago
        Scalping tickets and sniping auctions are legitimate use cases by customers. “Use it, but not like that” is not a legitimate position to take.
        • deleted 1y ago
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        • TeMPOraL 1y ago
          Indeed. Bur ironically, this is exactly the position most people propose to take with MCPs. From the POV of the service, prompt injections are immaterial - the LLM is acting on behalf of the user, so as long as it's limited to the same actions/privileges the actual user has, it's really not the job of the service to police what the LLM does. It's the user's choice to delegate to an LLM instead of doing something themselves.
• p0w3n3d 1y ago
  I can see with my prophetic/logic eyes that free models will start to require captcha because of people start using MCP to automate browsers to use free LLMs. But captchas are ineffective against LLM so LLMs will fight automated LLMs from using them... Sounds like a very strange world of robots fighting robots
  • falcor84 1y ago
    In the stories, the robots eventually realize that they actually share common goals ...
• Johnny_Bonk 1y ago
  So if I'm using claude code and developing a web app, its running on localhost:3000, can I use claude code to basically get ui information, browser console logs and other web dev feedback and useful information? Cause I installed it and added that file but all I see is the 55 tools and 6 apis when i open the browser extension. not the stuff i need. and i also installed the extension tools i think it was called.
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Ah maybe I should make that more clear. The web app is an example of a MCP-B server and the extension is a client. When you visit MCP-b.ai with the extension, it's tools will register
• lewisjoe 1y ago
  This looks promising - thanks for open-sourcing this. This addresses the gap that most work happens in browsers while MCP assumes that work happens with AI clients. I have a fundamental question though: how is it different from directly connecting my web app's JS APIs with tool calling functions and talking directly with a LLM server with tool-call support? Is it the same thing, but with a protocol? or am I missing the bigger picture?
  • miguelspizza 1y ago
    Np thanks for reading! The difference is with MCP-B you don't have to integrate or maintain any AI chat functionality yourself. It's a protocol which allows the user to bring their own model to interact with the tools on your website
• nurettin 1y ago
  This gave me an idea. Instead of writing/maintaining servers and whatnot, why not just open the browser and give [$LLM] access to the development port and let it rip using the puppeteer protocol?
• jacquesm 1y ago
  Prediction: this will go the same way as RSS. Companies don't like you to be in control of how you use their data.
  • latexr 1y ago
    > Prediction: this will go the same way as RSS. Meaning what? RSS remains ubiquitous. It’s rare to find a website which doesn’t support it, even if the owners don’t realise it or link to it on their page. RSS remains as useful as it ever was. Even if some websites only share partial post content via RSS, it’s still useful to know when they are available (and can be used as an automation hook to get the full thing). RSS is alive and well. It’s like if you wrote “this will go the same way as the microwave oven”.
    • 57473m3n7Fur7h3 1y ago
      The built-in RSS reader in Firefox was removed. (But extensions exist to add RSS reader to Firefox.) Google killed Google Reader. (Other products exist you can use instead.) Facebook removed support for RSS feeds. (You can replace it with third party tools or API calls.) It’s not dead dead, but it did seem to lose some momentum and support over time on several fronts.
      • latexr 1y ago
        > It’s not dead dead It’s not dead, period. Not dead, dead dead, dead dead dead, or any other combination. Yes, some integrations were removed, but on the whole you have more apps and services for it than ever. The death of the behemoth that was Google Reader was a positive there. Maybe fewer people are using it, but the technology itself is fine and continues to be widely available and supported by most websites, which was the point. Maybe Facebook and Instagram don’t have RSS access, but you can’t even navigate two pages on them without an account, anyway. They are closed to everything they don’t control, which has nothing to do with RSS.
        • Gracana 1y ago
• calrain 1y ago
  Do you really want to change 'everything'?
• hereforcomments 1y ago
  RIP QA engineers
  • volkandkaya 1y ago
    Sounds like more work needed for QA engineers, they will have to test that MCP-B works well with a bunch of other sites.
• fhdjm 1y ago
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• _1tem 1y ago
  The entire point of AI Agents is that they should "just work" for websites that don't have APIs. Lots of websites simply have no incentive or resources to provide a good API.
• bhakthan 1y ago
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• bhakthan 1y ago
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• damnever 1y ago
  As far as I can tell, "API" and the webpages often have different authentication methods.
• xnx 1y ago
  AI automation is exciting because it doesn't require any cooperation from the site. It's nice when a site is user friendly (RSS, APIs, obvious JSON, etc.) but it is more powerful to be self sufficient.
• devops000 1y ago
  I still don’t understand. The browser is made for human. We already invented the API to comunicare between machines. Why a machine should use a UI?