9 ms·

Show HN: Vibium – Browser automation for AI and humans, by Selenium's creator

443 points by hugs 10mo ago

i started the selenium project 21 years ago. vibium is what i'd build if i started over today with ai agents in mind. go binary under the hood (handles browser, bidi, mcp) but devs never see it. just npm install vibium. python/java coming. for claude code: claude mcp add vibium -- npx -y vibium v1 ships today. ama.

christophilus 10mo ago
Nice. I was just thinking of building this very thing. Glad to see I won’t have to. I’ll check it out after the holidays.
- hugs 10mo ago
  what specific things were you looking for?
  - christophilus 10mo ago
    My use case is mainly to make it easier to show Claude Code a problem with an SPA as I develop it. Claude’s decent at traditional server-rendered stuff, since it can curl and reason a bit about the responses, but SPAs require something more like your tool here.
    - xnx 10mo ago
      You might try Google Antigravity since it is natively designed to test in the browser as it codes.
anamexis 10mo ago
My number one question would be how it compares to Playwright -- differences in design goals, capabilities, advantages and disadvantages.
- hugs 10mo ago
  it's a good questionn! i partially addressed this in the "why vibium" section of the v1 announcement: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2025-12-11-v1-announcement.md#why-vibium https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2... to save a click, i'll post it here, too: ----------- why vibium? there are dozens of "ai-powered browser" tools now. so why this one? the selenium ecosystem is massive: millions of tests, thousands of companies, decades of investment. but there's no obvious bridge to the ai future. many have moved to playwright — and for good reason: it's fast, easy to use, has popular features like auto-waiting, integrated video recording, and a ton of other batteries included. vibium takes the same approach. batteries included. great dx. but built for where the industry is going: ai agents that need to drive browsers. when i did those interviews in september, the response wasn't just "cool idea." it was relief. the community trusts us to build this bridge because we built the last two: selenium in 2004, appium in 2012. community and ecosystem are the moat.
  - anamexis 10mo ago
    Thanks! I don't think it really answers my question though. AFAIK Playwright also takes the approach of batteries included, great dx, and has a lot of good integration with AI agents. Basically, what sets Vibium apart?
    - therunninglight 10mo ago
      vibium is hardly 2 days old. the 5-yr plan is grand. quoting hugs "goal is to embrace what playwright has done well, then extend what's possible".
      - anamexis 10mo ago
        I appreciate that it's brand new, but I'm still very interested in knowing about what sets it apart, even if that is all just vision at this point. What does "extending what's possible" mean?
suchintan 10mo ago
This is very cool. We were thinking about doing something very similar with Skyvern What was the reason you went down this path instead of extending selenium with AI features?
- hugs 10mo ago
  i partially addressed this in the "why vibium" section of the v1 announcement: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2025-12-11-v1-announcement.md#why-vibium https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2... but why a new thing vs extending selenium? it's a little complicated, but neither selenium nor playwright were designed with ai in mind from day 1. with vibium, i'm optimizing for "vibe coding" and ai-driven workflows first.
  - suchintan 10mo ago
    This makes sense. I guess I wanted to understand why starting from scratch was better than "fixing" selenium, but perhaps "fixing" selenium isn't an option?
    - hugs 10mo ago
      for the entire testing tools industry, in some ways, selenium was the "final boss" to beat. every new tool had to trash selenium in their marketing. eventually those "hit points" added up. "fixing selenium" is as much as of a branding problem as it is a technical problem. "oh, there's a new version of selenium? i heard selenium sucks!" is actually a problem that has to be dealt with. an entire new generation of coders only know "playwright rules, selenium drools". of course, i have a new host of problems by going all in with "vibium"... i'm making a huge bet that "vibe coding" is a trend, not a fad. (it could still be a fad! we'll see if this post ages well soon enough!)
      - suchintan 10mo ago
        That makes a lot of sense. Sometimes it's easier to leave the baggage behind. It's too bad..selenium is a masterpiece. Thanks for sharing it with the world
moss_dog 10mo ago
I'd love to be able to lock down the browser to only allow certain URLs (e.g. localhost) so I can give Claude (and other tools) carte blanche to use browser automation (rather than manually approving each command). Is this something on your radar / roadmap?
- ramoz 10mo ago
  If using Claude Code, a simple hook can govern `browser_navigate` (mcp) A custom sh script or something for whitelists would take ~5min to setup. For more robust governance (many policies), you can write Rego using https://github.com/eqtylab/cupcake https://github.com/eqtylab/cupcake https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks#mcp-tool-naming https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks#mcp-tool-naming
  - moss_dog 10mo ago
    Thank you for the links / info! I'm looking forward to digging into this.
- hugs 10mo ago
  fully aware of the "blast radius" risk of using claude to do stuff. i'm doing all my vibium dev in a vm using UTM (and you should, too!). wonder if there are some network rules we can add. i did post a v2 roadmap on the github repo. might be time to start the draft for v3!
- falcor84 10mo ago
  As I see it, the only real solution is to put it into a container that has a firewall with a short whitelist.
  - moss_dog 10mo ago
    I was looking into this earlier -- presumably you'd also need to allowlist Claude itself (whatever endpoints it hits to run inference etc). VM firewall gets a little trickier with Claude's web search tool, too. The solution I landed on recently was to locally modify the Chrome devtools MCP to launch the browser instance with strict network restrictions. I believe the implementation used `--host-resolver-rules`, blocking all URLs by default with an environment variable to control the allowlist (which, in hindsight, Claude can easily work around if it needs to -- I should probably just hard-code the allowlist).
mannanj 10mo ago
Hi this looks really valuable, thanks for developing and sharing. Would you share some use cases and how you or your users use it personally? would love to see some examples and feel the aha "That's how I'd like to use it too!" and it would help me drive and se the problems I have as being solvable by this too rather than seeing a tool/solution looking for a problem. (not implying you're that, but without examples/use cases that's the default way I think)
- hugs 10mo ago
  lots of people have already been posting examples of how they used vibium on linkedin. (code's only been available for a day or two, so we're just getting started!) we also have a new discord server for the project that we just spun up and will be opening up more widely soon. discord could be a good place to share uses cases and experiments until we set up a more formal website structure).
maximgeorge 10mo ago
[flagged]
rancar2 10mo ago
I wasn’t able to gather the future state plans beyond what’s noted in the V2 plans: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md What’s next 5 years look like given that you are very good at building long-term projects that last and evolve through time? And for a very specific example, what’s the plan for incorporating new standards like Agent Skills as they quickly evolve and launch?
- hugs 10mo ago
  short term: yeah, we should totally add agent skills asap! new year's eve goal? as far as long term plans go, i like the tim o'reilly quote: "create more value than you capture". with selenium, we created an entire ecosystem of tools, users, companies, and economic activity. (literally billions of usd -- it's a story frequently ignored by the tech press when looking for "open source success stories".) but i hope to do the same with vibium. there will likely be a hosted "vibium.cloud" hosted service. i also hope there will be lots of them. in a similar way, there weren't many "hosted selenium" services when i started sauce labs. now there's a bunch. browserstack, lambdatest, etc. it was also not really an accident we did that with selenium. there is a lot of behind-the-scenes consensus building that happens to make things like a w3c webdriver standard happen. (funfact: vibium relies on the new! w3c standard "webdriver bidi" protocol heavily inspired by the chrome devtools protocol used by playwright. (tl;dr: it's just json over websockets.) i'm betting on industry cooperation, standards, and shared prosperity. that's my 5 year plan!
hcoura 10mo ago
How does it handle context bloat between the browser and the llm? Any plans of exposing more of the browser? For instance playwright is able to store tracing files the agent may decide to read to understand some requests / payloads… Any plans on allowing the agent to run an arbitrary js script?
- hugs 10mo ago
  i definitely have plans to expose more of the browser! at the moment, it's very limited. i'm not sure if anyone has completely nailed the context bloat problem -- it's worth more study and benchmarking. i suspect the long term answer is "don't use mcp". but mcp (warts and all) felt like a table-stakes feature for a v1 release. also need to clarify: there are two apis exposed right now: the mcp server and a "plain old" js/ts api. the js/api does have the ability to run arbitrary js. theoretically, you could ask an agent to write a vibium script with the js/ts library, and have the ai run that... (which ironically? is also a way to deal with the issue of context bloat)
deleted 10mo ago
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michelb 10mo ago
Interesting, I've been using this skill https://github.com/SawyerHood/dev-browser https://github.com/SawyerHood/dev-browser to save on context and get some more speed. Will try this out!
- hugs 10mo ago
  yeah, looking to play more with (and support) skills with vibium soon.
  - chews 10mo ago
    big virtual hugs for @hugs... thank you for the Christmas gift of fewer keystrokes :-)
nivekney 10mo ago
Aside from the project itself, I am learning a lot just from reading the commits. Mostly about the process when one knows how they'd do it. https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/commits/main/?after=ffc31ca943f3abb915f13633dfd5c01bb4d377e3+69 https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/commits/main/?after=ffc3...
- therunninglight 10mo ago
  likewise, watching it take shape in real time is fascinating
- hugs 10mo ago
  thanks. if ai-assisted development is the future of software (and i think it is), it was important i put my money where my mouth is and develop it by doing exactly that.
ripped_britches 10mo ago
What is the benefit of using this instead of playwright?
- hugs 10mo ago
  it will be more obvious in v2. v1 is about getting to a base-line of functionality. things get interesting in v2: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md
badlogic 10mo ago
Neat. Any reason why the MCP server doesn't expose a JavaScript/eval tool? Current models excel at writing JS to drive and inspect the DOM. They aren't great at driving browsers via screenshots.
- hugs 10mo ago
  > why the MCP server doesn't expose a JavaScript/eval tool? no reason other than my number #1 goal was "ship something". i only started the actual coding on dec 11. it's been a bit of a sprint the last two weeks! though "image-based" vs "dom-based" testing approaches is a very big topic! (look forward to researching that more in the future.) v1 announcement: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2025-12-11-v1-announcement.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2...
- coty 10mo ago
  FWIW, if you have Claude Code or the like, you can quickly prompt your way to an eval function in MCP. It already exists in clicker and the client API. You can use it to get the accessibility tree, for example, and use that to find what to fill out and click.
999900000999 10mo ago
As someone who's made a good living primarily in UI automation for over a decade, thank you. It's been an interesting journey.I do think Playwright is the defacto standard now, but Selenium was the original browser driver. Anyway, how does Vibium compare to Playwright ? Playwright's main advantage is it has official support for multiple languages.
- hugs 10mo ago
  > I do think Playwright is the defacto standard now i'll politely pushback a little. i think it's safe (at this moment in time) to say: playwright wins the first derivative, but selenium wins the "area under the curve". selenium is very entrenched in many parts of the world, especially outside of SF/USA. part of the inbound interest i've been getting for vibium is from those selenium users who want some kind of bridge to the future, but didn't have an obvious path forward beyond "dump selenium, adopt playwright"... part of my plan with vibium post-v1 is to give that massive (and it truly is massive, i'm not bragging) installed base of selenium users an upgrade path to more agentic coding options.
  - steve_adams_86 10mo ago
    Selenium is distinctly more popular among scientists in my experience. I've only seen playwright at startups.
    - therunninglight 10mo ago
      same in my experience.
    - 999900000999 10mo ago
      I've personally implemented Playwright in a large enterprise company. Puppeteer before that. Generally if you have a lot of legacy selenium scripts it's probably not worth it to switch everything over, but if you're creating a new UI automation framework I've just never seen selenium as a first choice for that. Don't get me wrong it's still solid technology though.
starik36 10mo ago
How do you install it into Claude Desktop? I tried the following, but it fails. "vibium": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "@vibium/mcp@latest" ] }
- therunninglight 10mo ago
  "vibium": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "vibium" ] } source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/apzal-bahin_ai-mcp-browserautomation-ugcPost-7409327118272086016-yJAi?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAC89VgBubmiBbJ1k7VFESDO6W-iHOMFgOE https://www.linkedin.com/posts/apzal-bahin_ai-mcp-browseraut...
  - starik36 10mo ago
    That didn't work - generates errors. But there is a PR in progress that should fix it at some point soon.
jeff4f5da2 10mo ago
Since it's in go, wouldn't it be great if it also expose go api?
- hugs 10mo ago
  yes, yes it would!
captainregex 10mo ago
entirely possible I’m just really bad at this stuff but I can’t get browser agents to do simple report pulls without running into a captcha or a dropdown menu that breaks its brain. hopefully this is the one!
- hugs 10mo ago
  good security will always be the eternal enemy of easy automation.
  - therunninglight 10mo ago
    the realm of bots vs bots
rukuu001 10mo ago
Hey man, just wanted to say thanks for Selenium - it was a game changer and had a big impact on my professional life. I’m interested in checking out Vibium - I’ve been a reluctant adopter of Playwright and hopeful for a new approach.
- hugs 10mo ago
  playwright got a lot of things right. one of the big ones was a fast websockets+json way to drive the browser. (vibium is using the w3c standard equivalent - webdriver bidi). but they also raised the bar on usability and developer experience. i hope to get to the level of "click, click, awesome" out-of-the-box experience that playwright did so well.
- pkiv 10mo ago
  If you're already using Playwright, I'd love for you to give Stagehand a try (https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand) - it has compatible-ish API, but built for automation, not testing.
  - hugs 10mo ago
    stagehand is good stuff!
  - zenmac 10mo ago
    Hmmm so it is basically using https://www.director.ai https://www.director.ai for the AI natural language stuff right?
    - brianjking 10mo ago
      Director.ai uses Stagehand, which is made by Browserbase.
- irjustin 10mo ago
  > I’ve been a reluctant adopter of Playwright and hopeful for a new approach. Out of curiosity, why? Personally, I'm a massive lover of playwright. Flakiness has been so much lower for us.
cboyardee 10mo ago
[dead]
dmd 10mo ago
Does it allow you to inject js, modify the DOM, and most crucially monitor/modify network requests? I do those things in probably 95-99% of the time I reach for playwright mcp in claude, and from the "For Agents" part of the README, it seems like all this can do is click/type/screenshot?
- hugs 10mo ago
  > inject js, modify the DOM, and most crucially monitor/modify network requests not yet. definitely on the roadmap, though. goal is to embrace what playwright has done well, then extend what's possible...
  - dmd 10mo ago
    Thanks. I would love to understand what people are doing with Playwright that doesn't involve those things. I really can't recall ever using it where that wasn't what I was doing. I use it letting Claude fix things. You can't fix what you can't see! What else are people using it for? Obviously there must be a (very popular!) use case for "just clicking", but I can't seem to imagine it.
    - hugs 10mo ago
      don't underestimate the "just clicking" use case!
      - therunninglight 10mo ago
        hugs built an entire career on the "click" case (just making a button work). no wonder, the vibium go binary us called "clicker".
    - VoidWhisperer 10mo ago
      In my experience, we've used playwright significantly for unit/integration tests combining it with react-testing-library to verify individual components and also whole (mocked, we used something else that I can't seem to remember for E2E tests) flows within that React application
j2kun 10mo ago
Is this something you use to generate static browser tests that no longer use the LLM? Or would you need to use the LLM every time you run the tests?
- therunninglight 10mo ago
  - No LLM Getting Started with Vibium (beginner-friendly): https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/tutorials/getting-started.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/tutorials... - MCP option (where tokens will eventually get burned) Getting Started with Vibium MCP: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/tutorials/getting-started-mcp.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/tutorials...
rahimnathwani 10mo ago
If an agent gets a copy of the screen using browser_screenshot and then wants to click somewhere on that screen, how is it meant to find the right css selector to pass to browser_click? There's a browser_find method, but that assumes you already know what type of element it is. But I can't always tell what type of element something is just by looking at a screenshot. What have I missed or misunderstood?
- coty 10mo ago
  For right now, the MCP server doesn’t expose quite enough to navigate on its own. I’ve added a browser_evaluate tool in my fork—though I haven’t committed or pushed a PR yet. With that, the agent can call JavaScript to get the accessibility tree and then use that to navigate via browser_find. This and much more will be coming soon. See the V2 roadmap for more insight: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md
  - hugs 10mo ago
    one of the wild things about vibe coding is... i want to add that feature, but i'm slightly more interested in using the prompt/spec you might have used to create it, not the patch itself.
    - rahimnathwani 10mo ago
      Sometimes an AI-written spec based on the code is better than that the spec/prompts used to create the patch.
    - coty 10mo ago
      Yeah. Let me see if I can find or reconstitute that prompt. Ultimately I wanted to have a system for automagically keeping Java up-to-date with JavaScript.
OutOfHere 10mo ago
I will wait for full Python and Go support.
- therunninglight 10mo ago
  python client coming soon to PyPi
- hugs 10mo ago
  have plans for new year's eve?
jstummbillig 10mo ago
Cool. Can this currently be used with codex in the same way?
- hugs 10mo ago
  not today. but the plan is to be very "big tent" and support as many options as possible.
michaelsbradley 10mo ago
Anyone attempting something similar for Qt/QML based apps?
- rubymamis 10mo ago
  I thought about it as well. Might do it at some point.
pryelluw 10mo ago
Any plans to support local models through llama.cpp or similar?
- hugs 10mo ago
  100% yes. favorites?
  - pryelluw 10mo ago
    I daily drive llama.cpp so that please.
    - hugs 10mo ago
      which local models? (e.g. qwen, llama, mistral?)
      - pryelluw 10mo ago
        Oh qwen mostly. The smaller ones > 10B. Happy to be a tester ! Email in profile
didip 10mo ago
And this handles login sessions, cookies, etc.? So much of the modern web is now hidden behind login sessions.
- hugs 10mo ago
  there's generally only 3 ways to make money in browser automation: 1) test automation (my specialty) 2) data scraping / crawling 3) business/robotic process automation (e.g. back-office data entry, processing invoices, etc.) when it comes to handling login sessions, cookies, etc. test automation is the easiest. (you create disposable test logins and use them in each test. it's mostly a solved problem.) handling logins is a way gnarlier problem in data scraping and business process automation. i'm focused on test automation in v1. (i'm hoping experts in data scraping and process automation can help me improve vibium in this regard.)
  - mlrtime 10mo ago
    Thank you for helping me understand this. I'm trying to use various tools to automate downloading my energy usage from my provider. They seem to be going to great lengths to try and prevent this. It sucks because I want to conserve and reconcile usage. entergy.com ... I'm hoping your tool or playwright will help me get it into home assistant.
palidanx 10mo ago
Sorry, I kind of have a dumb question here. So we have a bunch of legacy selenium scripts that do end to end user testing, and occasion they break (either because of a network error, or devs committed something that breaks a test). We were looking at seeing if a model could look at the screenshot of the failure, some of the original website source code, and try to fix the failing test. My question is with vibium, would it make more sense to port the legacy tests over to vibium, and if a test fail, use its capabilities to try to self-heal?
- hugs 10mo ago
  i apologize, but i'll answer your question with a metaphor. i want to build an island resort and a bridge from the mainland to get there. do i build the island resort first or the bridge first? here's my thinking: if the resort is popular and a fun place to be, there will be a huge incentive to build the bridge next. but we might also find out that building the bridge will ultimately be economically impractical and we should just stick to using ferry boats. at least we'll have a cool island resort to go to, though! so for now, i'm just focusing on building the island resort at the moment. but i really, really want to build that bridge, too, asap.
eth0up 10mo ago
I recently conducted a little research project involving YouTube comments, where selenium made it possible. Quite cool to see the legend here, still active. Thanks, from a very tiny human.
- hugs 10mo ago
  thanks for using it! <heart-emoji/> i try to say this often, but it never feels like enough: yes, i started the project, but it's a relay race. i ran the first few laps, but the project has been going for 21 years now. there's dozens (hundreds?) of people to thank at this point for the success and impact that the selenium project has achieved.
jaredwy 10mo ago
Hey! You really helped my career. We chatted a lot maybe 13-15 years ago and really helped atlassian scale their selenium tests at the time. So glad to see you are still in this space!
saikatsg 10mo ago
The good old days of browser automation! Thanks a lot for Selenium and all the best for Vibium :)
- hugs 10mo ago
  thanks!
mintflow 10mo ago
great project, just add the mcp and try in claude code, it automatically help me to broser a local forum and give a summary of hot posts today. this is the second MCP i added, quit impressive. Merry christmas!
xpe 10mo ago
I'm thinking about various security models. When it comes to browser integration, I'm particularly interested in defense-in-depth rather than trusting the shIP activities to the captAIn. Bad puns aside, this is an important area! Many of us want to know what people are building (or should be built) to put security front and center -- or at least integrated --rather than an afterthought. Components might include: sandboxing, access rules, logging, honey-pot mode, perhaps even read-only access for a "protector" agent. (Another common approach here is wishful thinking such as "this ship is unsinkable", but that ship has sailed for me.) Putting on my dark humor hat, if all else fails, there could be a "time to panic" mode triggered by certain criteria (e.g. a regex matching "your bank account balance is $0"). What can biology teach us? When you think about defense-in-depth for "insider threats" in the human body, what comes to mind? There are many; here is one: reflexes. Your motor planning neurons might send your hand towards a hot surface and succeed, but they will be quickly countermanded [1] by a reflex arc [2]. P.S. Please don't interpret my style as a lack of seriousness. If used carelessly, this technology opens up some impressive botnet potential. Luckily, with the benefit of wishful thinking or just flat-out ignorance, we can trust humans and AIs to be adequately trustworthy. [2] [3] [1]: maybe overruled is a better term? [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_arc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_arc [3]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/the_psychology_2.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/the_psycholog... [4]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
gsnedders 10mo ago
Is there any plan about how to deal with indirect prompt injection attacks that could trivially be lurking in malicious web pages, given the agent can navigate to an arbitrary URL?
- hugs 10mo ago
  short-term mediation is always always always run it in a virtual machine with as minimal credentials as possible.
password-app 10mo ago
Congrats on shipping v1. The "sense-think-act" architecture is exactly what's needed for agentic workflows. Re: the login handling discussion upthread—I've been using browser-use for automated password rotation (breach response use case). Two patterns that might be relevant to Vibium's roadmap: Credential injection: Instead of putting passwords in the prompt, pass them via a sensitive_data parameter. The agent calls enter_password() without the value ever appearing in LLM context. Solves the "blast radius" concern several people raised. Deterministic 2FA handling: When email verification is required, open Gmail in a new tab, but extract OTPs with local regex—not AI. The LLM orchestrates navigation; code extraction stays local. Handles ~90% of email 2FA automatically. These patterns should work with any browser automation framework. Built a Mac app around this: https://thepassword.app https://thepassword.app Would love to see Vibium add first-class support for credential injection in the API—it's the missing piece for any security-sensitive automation.
rule2025 10mo ago
What can this mainly do? How is it different from Chrome devtools MCP?

443 points by hugs 10mo ago

christophilus 10mo ago

Nice. I was just thinking of building this very thing. Glad to see I won’t have to. I’ll check it out after the holidays.

hugs 10mo ago
what specific things were you looking for?
- christophilus 10mo ago
  My use case is mainly to make it easier to show Claude Code a problem with an SPA as I develop it. Claude’s decent at traditional server-rendered stuff, since it can curl and reason a bit about the responses, but SPAs require something more like your tool here.
  - xnx 10mo ago
    You might try Google Antigravity since it is natively designed to test in the browser as it codes.

anamexis 10mo ago

My number one question would be how it compares to Playwright -- differences in design goals, capabilities, advantages and disadvantages.

hugs 10mo ago
it's a good questionn! i partially addressed this in the "why vibium" section of the v1 announcement: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2025-12-11-v1-announcement.md#why-vibium https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2... to save a click, i'll post it here, too: ----------- why vibium? there are dozens of "ai-powered browser" tools now. so why this one? the selenium ecosystem is massive: millions of tests, thousands of companies, decades of investment. but there's no obvious bridge to the ai future. many have moved to playwright — and for good reason: it's fast, easy to use, has popular features like auto-waiting, integrated video recording, and a ton of other batteries included. vibium takes the same approach. batteries included. great dx. but built for where the industry is going: ai agents that need to drive browsers. when i did those interviews in september, the response wasn't just "cool idea." it was relief. the community trusts us to build this bridge because we built the last two: selenium in 2004, appium in 2012. community and ecosystem are the moat.
- anamexis 10mo ago
  Thanks! I don't think it really answers my question though. AFAIK Playwright also takes the approach of batteries included, great dx, and has a lot of good integration with AI agents. Basically, what sets Vibium apart?
  - therunninglight 10mo ago
    vibium is hardly 2 days old. the 5-yr plan is grand. quoting hugs "goal is to embrace what playwright has done well, then extend what's possible".
    - anamexis 10mo ago
      I appreciate that it's brand new, but I'm still very interested in knowing about what sets it apart, even if that is all just vision at this point. What does "extending what's possible" mean?

suchintan 10mo ago

This is very cool. We were thinking about doing something very similar with Skyvern What was the reason you went down this path instead of extending selenium with AI features?

hugs 10mo ago
i partially addressed this in the "why vibium" section of the v1 announcement: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2025-12-11-v1-announcement.md#why-vibium https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2... but why a new thing vs extending selenium? it's a little complicated, but neither selenium nor playwright were designed with ai in mind from day 1. with vibium, i'm optimizing for "vibe coding" and ai-driven workflows first.
- suchintan 10mo ago
  This makes sense. I guess I wanted to understand why starting from scratch was better than "fixing" selenium, but perhaps "fixing" selenium isn't an option?
  - hugs 10mo ago
    for the entire testing tools industry, in some ways, selenium was the "final boss" to beat. every new tool had to trash selenium in their marketing. eventually those "hit points" added up. "fixing selenium" is as much as of a branding problem as it is a technical problem. "oh, there's a new version of selenium? i heard selenium sucks!" is actually a problem that has to be dealt with. an entire new generation of coders only know "playwright rules, selenium drools". of course, i have a new host of problems by going all in with "vibium"... i'm making a huge bet that "vibe coding" is a trend, not a fad. (it could still be a fad! we'll see if this post ages well soon enough!)
    - suchintan 10mo ago
      That makes a lot of sense. Sometimes it's easier to leave the baggage behind. It's too bad..selenium is a masterpiece. Thanks for sharing it with the world

moss_dog 10mo ago

I'd love to be able to lock down the browser to only allow certain URLs (e.g. localhost) so I can give Claude (and other tools) carte blanche to use browser automation (rather than manually approving each command). Is this something on your radar / roadmap?

ramoz 10mo ago
If using Claude Code, a simple hook can govern `browser_navigate` (mcp) A custom sh script or something for whitelists would take ~5min to setup. For more robust governance (many policies), you can write Rego using https://github.com/eqtylab/cupcake https://github.com/eqtylab/cupcake https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks#mcp-tool-naming https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks#mcp-tool-naming
- moss_dog 10mo ago
  Thank you for the links / info! I'm looking forward to digging into this.
hugs 10mo ago
fully aware of the "blast radius" risk of using claude to do stuff. i'm doing all my vibium dev in a vm using UTM (and you should, too!). wonder if there are some network rules we can add. i did post a v2 roadmap on the github repo. might be time to start the draft for v3!
falcor84 10mo ago
As I see it, the only real solution is to put it into a container that has a firewall with a short whitelist.
- moss_dog 10mo ago
  I was looking into this earlier -- presumably you'd also need to allowlist Claude itself (whatever endpoints it hits to run inference etc). VM firewall gets a little trickier with Claude's web search tool, too. The solution I landed on recently was to locally modify the Chrome devtools MCP to launch the browser instance with strict network restrictions. I believe the implementation used `--host-resolver-rules`, blocking all URLs by default with an environment variable to control the allowlist (which, in hindsight, Claude can easily work around if it needs to -- I should probably just hard-code the allowlist).

mannanj 10mo ago

Hi this looks really valuable, thanks for developing and sharing. Would you share some use cases and how you or your users use it personally? would love to see some examples and feel the aha "That's how I'd like to use it too!" and it would help me drive and se the problems I have as being solvable by this too rather than seeing a tool/solution looking for a problem. (not implying you're that, but without examples/use cases that's the default way I think)

hugs 10mo ago
lots of people have already been posting examples of how they used vibium on linkedin. (code's only been available for a day or two, so we're just getting started!) we also have a new discord server for the project that we just spun up and will be opening up more widely soon. discord could be a good place to share uses cases and experiments until we set up a more formal website structure).

maximgeorge 10mo ago

[flagged]

rancar2 10mo ago

I wasn’t able to gather the future state plans beyond what’s noted in the V2 plans: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md What’s next 5 years look like given that you are very good at building long-term projects that last and evolve through time? And for a very specific example, what’s the plan for incorporating new standards like Agent Skills as they quickly evolve and launch?

hugs 10mo ago
short term: yeah, we should totally add agent skills asap! new year's eve goal? as far as long term plans go, i like the tim o'reilly quote: "create more value than you capture". with selenium, we created an entire ecosystem of tools, users, companies, and economic activity. (literally billions of usd -- it's a story frequently ignored by the tech press when looking for "open source success stories".) but i hope to do the same with vibium. there will likely be a hosted "vibium.cloud" hosted service. i also hope there will be lots of them. in a similar way, there weren't many "hosted selenium" services when i started sauce labs. now there's a bunch. browserstack, lambdatest, etc. it was also not really an accident we did that with selenium. there is a lot of behind-the-scenes consensus building that happens to make things like a w3c webdriver standard happen. (funfact: vibium relies on the new! w3c standard "webdriver bidi" protocol heavily inspired by the chrome devtools protocol used by playwright. (tl;dr: it's just json over websockets.) i'm betting on industry cooperation, standards, and shared prosperity. that's my 5 year plan!

hcoura 10mo ago

How does it handle context bloat between the browser and the llm? Any plans of exposing more of the browser? For instance playwright is able to store tracing files the agent may decide to read to understand some requests / payloads… Any plans on allowing the agent to run an arbitrary js script?

hugs 10mo ago
i definitely have plans to expose more of the browser! at the moment, it's very limited. i'm not sure if anyone has completely nailed the context bloat problem -- it's worth more study and benchmarking. i suspect the long term answer is "don't use mcp". but mcp (warts and all) felt like a table-stakes feature for a v1 release. also need to clarify: there are two apis exposed right now: the mcp server and a "plain old" js/ts api. the js/api does have the ability to run arbitrary js. theoretically, you could ask an agent to write a vibium script with the js/ts library, and have the ai run that... (which ironically? is also a way to deal with the issue of context bloat)

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

michelb 10mo ago

Interesting, I've been using this skill https://github.com/SawyerHood/dev-browser https://github.com/SawyerHood/dev-browser to save on context and get some more speed. Will try this out!

hugs 10mo ago
yeah, looking to play more with (and support) skills with vibium soon.
- chews 10mo ago
  big virtual hugs for @hugs... thank you for the Christmas gift of fewer keystrokes :-)

nivekney 10mo ago

Aside from the project itself, I am learning a lot just from reading the commits. Mostly about the process when one knows how they'd do it. https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/commits/main/?after=ffc31ca943f3abb915f13633dfd5c01bb4d377e3+69 https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/commits/main/?after=ffc3...

therunninglight 10mo ago
likewise, watching it take shape in real time is fascinating
hugs 10mo ago
thanks. if ai-assisted development is the future of software (and i think it is), it was important i put my money where my mouth is and develop it by doing exactly that.

ripped_britches 10mo ago

What is the benefit of using this instead of playwright?

hugs 10mo ago
it will be more obvious in v2. v1 is about getting to a base-line of functionality. things get interesting in v2: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md

badlogic 10mo ago

Neat. Any reason why the MCP server doesn't expose a JavaScript/eval tool? Current models excel at writing JS to drive and inspect the DOM. They aren't great at driving browsers via screenshots.

hugs 10mo ago
> why the MCP server doesn't expose a JavaScript/eval tool? no reason other than my number #1 goal was "ship something". i only started the actual coding on dec 11. it's been a bit of a sprint the last two weeks! though "image-based" vs "dom-based" testing approaches is a very big topic! (look forward to researching that more in the future.) v1 announcement: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2025-12-11-v1-announcement.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2...
coty 10mo ago
FWIW, if you have Claude Code or the like, you can quickly prompt your way to an eval function in MCP. It already exists in clicker and the client API. You can use it to get the accessibility tree, for example, and use that to find what to fill out and click.

999900000999 10mo ago

As someone who's made a good living primarily in UI automation for over a decade, thank you. It's been an interesting journey.I do think Playwright is the defacto standard now, but Selenium was the original browser driver. Anyway, how does Vibium compare to Playwright ? Playwright's main advantage is it has official support for multiple languages.

hugs 10mo ago
> I do think Playwright is the defacto standard now i'll politely pushback a little. i think it's safe (at this moment in time) to say: playwright wins the first derivative, but selenium wins the "area under the curve". selenium is very entrenched in many parts of the world, especially outside of SF/USA. part of the inbound interest i've been getting for vibium is from those selenium users who want some kind of bridge to the future, but didn't have an obvious path forward beyond "dump selenium, adopt playwright"... part of my plan with vibium post-v1 is to give that massive (and it truly is massive, i'm not bragging) installed base of selenium users an upgrade path to more agentic coding options.
- steve_adams_86 10mo ago
  Selenium is distinctly more popular among scientists in my experience. I've only seen playwright at startups.
  - therunninglight 10mo ago
    same in my experience.
  - 999900000999 10mo ago
    I've personally implemented Playwright in a large enterprise company. Puppeteer before that. Generally if you have a lot of legacy selenium scripts it's probably not worth it to switch everything over, but if you're creating a new UI automation framework I've just never seen selenium as a first choice for that. Don't get me wrong it's still solid technology though.

starik36 10mo ago

How do you install it into Claude Desktop? I tried the following, but it fails. "vibium": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "@vibium/mcp@latest" ] }

therunninglight 10mo ago
"vibium": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "vibium" ] } source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/apzal-bahin_ai-mcp-browserautomation-ugcPost-7409327118272086016-yJAi?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAC89VgBubmiBbJ1k7VFESDO6W-iHOMFgOE https://www.linkedin.com/posts/apzal-bahin_ai-mcp-browseraut...
- starik36 10mo ago
  That didn't work - generates errors. But there is a PR in progress that should fix it at some point soon.

jeff4f5da2 10mo ago

Since it's in go, wouldn't it be great if it also expose go api?

hugs 10mo ago
yes, yes it would!

captainregex 10mo ago

entirely possible I’m just really bad at this stuff but I can’t get browser agents to do simple report pulls without running into a captcha or a dropdown menu that breaks its brain. hopefully this is the one!

hugs 10mo ago
good security will always be the eternal enemy of easy automation.
- therunninglight 10mo ago
  the realm of bots vs bots

rukuu001 10mo ago

Hey man, just wanted to say thanks for Selenium - it was a game changer and had a big impact on my professional life. I’m interested in checking out Vibium - I’ve been a reluctant adopter of Playwright and hopeful for a new approach.

hugs 10mo ago
playwright got a lot of things right. one of the big ones was a fast websockets+json way to drive the browser. (vibium is using the w3c standard equivalent - webdriver bidi). but they also raised the bar on usability and developer experience. i hope to get to the level of "click, click, awesome" out-of-the-box experience that playwright did so well.
pkiv 10mo ago
If you're already using Playwright, I'd love for you to give Stagehand a try (https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand) - it has compatible-ish API, but built for automation, not testing.
- hugs 10mo ago
  stagehand is good stuff!
- zenmac 10mo ago
  Hmmm so it is basically using https://www.director.ai https://www.director.ai for the AI natural language stuff right?
  - brianjking 10mo ago
    Director.ai uses Stagehand, which is made by Browserbase.
irjustin 10mo ago
> I’ve been a reluctant adopter of Playwright and hopeful for a new approach. Out of curiosity, why? Personally, I'm a massive lover of playwright. Flakiness has been so much lower for us.

cboyardee 10mo ago

[dead]

dmd 10mo ago

Does it allow you to inject js, modify the DOM, and most crucially monitor/modify network requests? I do those things in probably 95-99% of the time I reach for playwright mcp in claude, and from the "For Agents" part of the README, it seems like all this can do is click/type/screenshot?

hugs 10mo ago
> inject js, modify the DOM, and most crucially monitor/modify network requests not yet. definitely on the roadmap, though. goal is to embrace what playwright has done well, then extend what's possible...
- dmd 10mo ago
  Thanks. I would love to understand what people are doing with Playwright that doesn't involve those things. I really can't recall ever using it where that wasn't what I was doing. I use it letting Claude fix things. You can't fix what you can't see! What else are people using it for? Obviously there must be a (very popular!) use case for "just clicking", but I can't seem to imagine it.
  - hugs 10mo ago
    don't underestimate the "just clicking" use case!
    - therunninglight 10mo ago
      hugs built an entire career on the "click" case (just making a button work). no wonder, the vibium go binary us called "clicker".
  - VoidWhisperer 10mo ago
    In my experience, we've used playwright significantly for unit/integration tests combining it with react-testing-library to verify individual components and also whole (mocked, we used something else that I can't seem to remember for E2E tests) flows within that React application

j2kun 10mo ago

Is this something you use to generate static browser tests that no longer use the LLM? Or would you need to use the LLM every time you run the tests?

therunninglight 10mo ago
- No LLM Getting Started with Vibium (beginner-friendly): https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/tutorials/getting-started.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/tutorials... - MCP option (where tokens will eventually get burned) Getting Started with Vibium MCP: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/tutorials/getting-started-mcp.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/tutorials...

rahimnathwani 10mo ago

If an agent gets a copy of the screen using browser_screenshot and then wants to click somewhere on that screen, how is it meant to find the right css selector to pass to browser_click? There's a browser_find method, but that assumes you already know what type of element it is. But I can't always tell what type of element something is just by looking at a screenshot. What have I missed or misunderstood?

coty 10mo ago
For right now, the MCP server doesn’t expose quite enough to navigate on its own. I’ve added a browser_evaluate tool in my fork—though I haven’t committed or pushed a PR yet. With that, the agent can call JavaScript to get the accessibility tree and then use that to navigate via browser_find. This and much more will be coming soon. See the V2 roadmap for more insight: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md
- hugs 10mo ago
  one of the wild things about vibe coding is... i want to add that feature, but i'm slightly more interested in using the prompt/spec you might have used to create it, not the patch itself.
  - rahimnathwani 10mo ago
    Sometimes an AI-written spec based on the code is better than that the spec/prompts used to create the patch.
  - coty 10mo ago
    Yeah. Let me see if I can find or reconstitute that prompt. Ultimately I wanted to have a system for automagically keeping Java up-to-date with JavaScript.

OutOfHere 10mo ago

I will wait for full Python and Go support.

therunninglight 10mo ago
python client coming soon to PyPi
hugs 10mo ago
have plans for new year's eve?

jstummbillig 10mo ago

Cool. Can this currently be used with codex in the same way?

hugs 10mo ago
not today. but the plan is to be very "big tent" and support as many options as possible.

michaelsbradley 10mo ago

Anyone attempting something similar for Qt/QML based apps?

rubymamis 10mo ago
I thought about it as well. Might do it at some point.

pryelluw 10mo ago

Any plans to support local models through llama.cpp or similar?

hugs 10mo ago
100% yes. favorites?
- pryelluw 10mo ago
  I daily drive llama.cpp so that please.
  - hugs 10mo ago
    which local models? (e.g. qwen, llama, mistral?)
    - pryelluw 10mo ago
      Oh qwen mostly. The smaller ones > 10B. Happy to be a tester ! Email in profile

didip 10mo ago

And this handles login sessions, cookies, etc.? So much of the modern web is now hidden behind login sessions.

hugs 10mo ago
there's generally only 3 ways to make money in browser automation: 1) test automation (my specialty) 2) data scraping / crawling 3) business/robotic process automation (e.g. back-office data entry, processing invoices, etc.) when it comes to handling login sessions, cookies, etc. test automation is the easiest. (you create disposable test logins and use them in each test. it's mostly a solved problem.) handling logins is a way gnarlier problem in data scraping and business process automation. i'm focused on test automation in v1. (i'm hoping experts in data scraping and process automation can help me improve vibium in this regard.)
- mlrtime 10mo ago
  Thank you for helping me understand this. I'm trying to use various tools to automate downloading my energy usage from my provider. They seem to be going to great lengths to try and prevent this. It sucks because I want to conserve and reconcile usage. entergy.com ... I'm hoping your tool or playwright will help me get it into home assistant.

palidanx 10mo ago

Sorry, I kind of have a dumb question here. So we have a bunch of legacy selenium scripts that do end to end user testing, and occasion they break (either because of a network error, or devs committed something that breaks a test). We were looking at seeing if a model could look at the screenshot of the failure, some of the original website source code, and try to fix the failing test. My question is with vibium, would it make more sense to port the legacy tests over to vibium, and if a test fail, use its capabilities to try to self-heal?

hugs 10mo ago
i apologize, but i'll answer your question with a metaphor. i want to build an island resort and a bridge from the mainland to get there. do i build the island resort first or the bridge first? here's my thinking: if the resort is popular and a fun place to be, there will be a huge incentive to build the bridge next. but we might also find out that building the bridge will ultimately be economically impractical and we should just stick to using ferry boats. at least we'll have a cool island resort to go to, though! so for now, i'm just focusing on building the island resort at the moment. but i really, really want to build that bridge, too, asap.

eth0up 10mo ago

I recently conducted a little research project involving YouTube comments, where selenium made it possible. Quite cool to see the legend here, still active. Thanks, from a very tiny human.

hugs 10mo ago
thanks for using it! <heart-emoji/> i try to say this often, but it never feels like enough: yes, i started the project, but it's a relay race. i ran the first few laps, but the project has been going for 21 years now. there's dozens (hundreds?) of people to thank at this point for the success and impact that the selenium project has achieved.

jaredwy 10mo ago

Hey! You really helped my career. We chatted a lot maybe 13-15 years ago and really helped atlassian scale their selenium tests at the time. So glad to see you are still in this space!

saikatsg 10mo ago

The good old days of browser automation! Thanks a lot for Selenium and all the best for Vibium :)

hugs 10mo ago
thanks!

mintflow 10mo ago

great project, just add the mcp and try in claude code, it automatically help me to broser a local forum and give a summary of hot posts today. this is the second MCP i added, quit impressive. Merry christmas!

xpe 10mo ago

I'm thinking about various security models. When it comes to browser integration, I'm particularly interested in defense-in-depth rather than trusting the shIP activities to the captAIn. Bad puns aside, this is an important area! Many of us want to know what people are building (or should be built) to put security front and center -- or at least integrated --rather than an afterthought. Components might include: sandboxing, access rules, logging, honey-pot mode, perhaps even read-only access for a "protector" agent. (Another common approach here is wishful thinking such as "this ship is unsinkable", but that ship has sailed for me.) Putting on my dark humor hat, if all else fails, there could be a "time to panic" mode triggered by certain criteria (e.g. a regex matching "your bank account balance is $0"). What can biology teach us? When you think about defense-in-depth for "insider threats" in the human body, what comes to mind? There are many; here is one: reflexes. Your motor planning neurons might send your hand towards a hot surface and succeed, but they will be quickly countermanded [1] by a reflex arc [2]. P.S. Please don't interpret my style as a lack of seriousness. If used carelessly, this technology opens up some impressive botnet potential. Luckily, with the benefit of wishful thinking or just flat-out ignorance, we can trust humans and AIs to be adequately trustworthy. [2] [3] [1]: maybe overruled is a better term? [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_arc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_arc [3]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/the_psychology_2.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/the_psycholog... [4]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

gsnedders 10mo ago

Is there any plan about how to deal with indirect prompt injection attacks that could trivially be lurking in malicious web pages, given the agent can navigate to an arbitrary URL?

hugs 10mo ago
short-term mediation is always always always run it in a virtual machine with as minimal credentials as possible.

password-app 10mo ago

Congrats on shipping v1. The "sense-think-act" architecture is exactly what's needed for agentic workflows. Re: the login handling discussion upthread—I've been using browser-use for automated password rotation (breach response use case). Two patterns that might be relevant to Vibium's roadmap: Credential injection: Instead of putting passwords in the prompt, pass them via a sensitive_data parameter. The agent calls enter_password() without the value ever appearing in LLM context. Solves the "blast radius" concern several people raised. Deterministic 2FA handling: When email verification is required, open Gmail in a new tab, but extract OTPs with local regex—not AI. The LLM orchestrates navigation; code extraction stays local. Handles ~90% of email 2FA automatically. These patterns should work with any browser automation framework. Built a Mac app around this: https://thepassword.app https://thepassword.app Would love to see Vibium add first-class support for credential injection in the API—it's the missing piece for any security-sensitive automation.

rule2025 10mo ago

What can this mainly do? How is it different from Chrome devtools MCP?