20 ms·

Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)

604 points by xnx 8mo ago

aadishv 8mo ago
Someone already made a great agent skill for this, which I'm using daily, and it's been very cool! https://github.com/pasky/chrome-cdp-skill https://github.com/pasky/chrome-cdp-skill For example, I use codex to manage a local music library, and it was able to use the skill to open a YT Music tab in my browser, search for each album, and get the URL to pass to yt-dlp. Do note that it only works for Chrome browsers rn, so you have to edit the script to point to a different Chromium browser's binary (e.g. I use Helium) but it's simple enough
- Etheryte 8mo ago
  On one hand, cool demo, on the other, this is horrifying in more ways than I can begin to describe. You're literally one prompt injection away from someone having unlimited access to all of your everything.
  - aadishv 8mo ago
    Of course I still watch it and have my finger on the escape key at all times :)
    - bergheim 8mo ago
      For now you are. All these things fall with time, of course. You will stop caring once you start feeling safe, we all do. Also. AAarrgh, my new thing to be annoyed at is AI drivel written slop. "No browser automation framework, no separate browser instance, no re-login." Oh really, nice. No separate computer either? No separate power station, no house, no star wars? No something else we didn't ask for? Just one a toggle and you go? Whoaaaaaa. Edit: lol even the skill itself is vibe coded: Lightweight Chrome DevTools Protocol CLI. Connects directly via WebSocket — no Puppeteer, works with 100+ tabs, instant connection. I feel like there's nothing fucking left on the internet anymore that is not some mean of whatever the LLM is trained to talk like now.
      - tacitusarc 8mo ago
        What can you do? I mentioned the use of AI on another thread, asking essentially the same question. The comment was flagged, presumably as off topic. Fair enough, I guess. But about 80% (maybe more) of posted blogs etc that I see on HN now have very obvious signs of AI. Comments do too. I hate it. If I want to see what Claude thinks I can ask it. HN is becoming close to unusable, and this isn’t like the previous times where people say it’s like reddit or something. It is inundated with bot spam, it just happens the bot spam is sufficiently engaging and well-written that it is really hard to address.
        bergheim 8mo ago
        I hear you and I agree. I don't know. Gated communities?
        brabel 8mo ago
        Could you just be paranoid about it and seeing things where they aren’t? I can’t imagine someone using AI to comment on HN!
    - glenpierce 8mo ago
      I am in awe of the confidence you have in your reflexes.
      - aadishv 8mo ago
        You get used to it :) And especially once you get used to the YOLO lifestyle, you end up realizing that practically any form of security is entirely worthless when you're dealing with a 200 IQ brainwashed robot hacker. I think using the Pi coding agent really got me used to this way of thinking: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#toc_13 https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to...
  - mh- 8mo ago
    Not the person you're replying to, but: I just use a separate, dedicated Chrome profile that isn't logged into anything except what I'm working on. Then I keep the persistence, but without commingling in a way that dramatically increases the risk. edit: upon rereading, I now realize the (different) prompt injection risk you were calling out re: the handoff to yt-dlp. Separate profiles won't save you from that, though there are other approaches.
    - sofixa 8mo ago
      Even without the bash escape risk (which can be mitigated with the various ways of only allowing yt-dlp to be executed), YT Music is a paid service gated behind a Google account, with associated payment method. Even just stealing the auth cookie is pretty serious in terms of damage it could do.
      - mh- 8mo ago
        Agreed. I wouldn't cut loose an agent that's at risk of prompt injection w/ unscoped access to my primary Google account. But if I understood the original commenter's use case, they're just searching YT Music to get the URL to a given song. This appears[0] to work fine without being logged in. So you could parameterize or wrap the call to yt-dlp and only have your cookie jar usable there. [0]: https://music.youtube.com/search?q=sandstorm https://music.youtube.com/search?q=sandstorm [1]: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvkxXblpz8 https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvkxXblpz8
        sofixa 8mo ago
        Oh, that's true, even allows you to play without an account. I can swear that at some point it flat out refused any use unless you're logged in with an account that has YT Music (I remember having to go to regular YouTube to get the same song to send it to someone who didn't have it).
    - bartek_gdn 8mo ago
      That's also my approach, built quickly a cli for this with lightweight session management https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
  - sheepscreek 8mo ago
    As long as it’s gated and not turned on by default, it’s all good. They could also add a warning/sanity check similar to “allow pasting” in the console.
    - hrmtst93837 8mo ago
      [flagged]
- paulirish 8mo ago
  To be clear, this isn't a skill for the devtools mcp, but an independent project. It doesn't look bad, but obviously browser automation + agents is a very busy space with lots of parallel efforts. DevTools MCP and its new CLI are maintained by the team behind Chrome DevTools & Puppeteer and it certainly has a more comprehensive feature set. I'd expect it to be more reliable, but.. hey open source competition breeds innovation and I love that. :) (I used to work on the DevTools team. And I still do, too)
- xmorse 8mo ago
  Does anyone really use these hacked up with duct tape skills? why not use something more reliable like playwriter.dev?
- esperent 8mo ago
  > Most browser automation tools launch a fresh, isolated browser. This one connects to the Chrome you're already running Is this the same as what Claude in Chrome does? I tried that for a while and since I use Firefox and Chromium, the security problem of it seeing your tabs wasn't a big deal. Fresh Chrome install, only ever used for this exact purpose. Plus you can watch it working in real (actually very slow) time so if you did point it at something risky you can take over at any point. For actual testing of web apps though, a skill with playwright cli in headless mode is much more effective. About 1-2k context per interaction after a bit of tuning.
- Mashimo 8mo ago
  Mhh, yt-dlp already has a build in youtube search, could you not use that instead of anything with AI?
Yokohiii 8mo ago
Was already eye rolling about the headline. Then I realized it's from chrome. Hoping from some good stories from open claw users that permanently run debug sessions.
Sonofg0tham 8mo ago
[flagged]
- simianwords 8mo ago
  AI
  - rzmmm 8mo ago
    Yes. Can someone tell me why even HN has bots. For selling upvotes to advertisement purposes?
    - Sonofg0tham 8mo ago
      I'm not a bot and definitely not advertising - I'm new on HN and trying to contribute with a few comments where I can.
NiekvdMaas 8mo ago
Also works nicely together with agent-browser (https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser) using --auto-connect
speedgoose 8mo ago
Interesting. MCP APIs can be useful for humans too. Chrome's dev tools already had an API [1], but perhaps the new MCP one is more user friendly, as one main requirement of MCP APIs is to be understood and used correctly by current gen AI agents. [1]: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/ https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/
AlexDunit 8mo ago
[flagged]
- rob 8mo ago
  Someone left their bot on default settings.
  - Bengalilol 8mo ago
    The other reply to this 'bot' looks like another default thing: <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=David-Brug-Ai https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=David-Brug-Ai>
- David-Brug-Ai 8mo ago
  [flagged]
myrak 8mo ago
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zxspectrumk48 8mo ago
I found this one working amazingly well (same idea - connect to existing session): https://github.com/remorses/playwriter https://github.com/remorses/playwriter
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
boomskats 8mo ago
Been using this one for a while, mostly with codex on opencode. It's more reliable and token efficient than other devtools protocol MCPs i've tried. Favourite unexpected use case for me was telling gemini to use it as a SVG editing repl, where it was able to produce some fantastic looking custom icons for me after 3-4 generate/refresh/screenshot iterations. Also works very nicely with electron apps, both reverse engineering and extending.
raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
I don’t do any serious web development and haven’t for 25 years aside from recently vibe coding internal web admin portals for back end cloud + app dev projects. But I did recently have to implement a web crawler for a customer’s site for a RAG project using Chromium + Playwrite in a Docker container deployed to Lambda. I ran the Docker container locally for testing. Could a web developer test using Claude + Chromium in a Docker container without using their real Chrome instance?
- bartek_gdn 8mo ago
  Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
- vesselapi 8mo ago
  Yes, running Chromium in a Docker container works well for this. There are prebuilt images like https://hub.docker.com/r/browserless/chrome https://hub.docker.com/r/browserless/chrome that give you a headless instance you can connect to via CDP (Playwright, Puppeteer). Keeps everything isolated from your actual browser profile and credentials.
slrainka 8mo ago
chrome-cli with remote developer port has been working fine this entire time.
oldeucryptoboi 8mo ago
I tell Claude to use playwright so I don't even need to do the setup myself.
- nomilk 8mo ago
  Similarly, cursor has a built in browser and visit localhost to see the results in the browser. Although I don't use it much (I probably should).
tonyhschu 8mo ago
Very cool. I do something like this but with Playwright. It used to be a real token hog though, and got expensive fast. So much so that I built a wrapper to dump results to disk first then let the agent query instead. https://uisnap.dev/ https://uisnap.dev/ Will check this out to see if they’ve solved the token burn problem.
- Torn 8mo ago
  Mostly, yes: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli
- mambodog 8mo ago
  my workaround for this was to make a wrapper mcp server which uses claude haiku to summarize the page snapshot returned in the response of each playwright mcp call, and that has worked pretty well for me: https://github.com/jsdf/playwright-slim-mcp https://github.com/jsdf/playwright-slim-mcp
- esperent 8mo ago
  I use playwright CLI. Wrote a skill for it, and after a bit of tuning it's about 1-2k context per interaction which is fine. The key was that Claude only needs screenshots initially and then can query the dev tools for logs as needed.
JKolios 8mo ago
Now that there's widespread direct connectivity between agents and browser sessions, are CAPTCHAs even relevant anymore?
pritesh1908 8mo ago
I have been using Playwright for a fairly long time now. Do checkout
glerk 8mo ago
Note that this is a mega token guzzler in case you’re paying for your own tokens!
senand 8mo ago
I suggest to use https://github.com/simonw/rodney https://github.com/simonw/rodney instead
- meowface 8mo ago
  Unfortunately there are like a billion competitors to this right now (including Playwright MCP, Playwright CLI, the new baked-in Playwright feature in Codex /experimental, Claude Code for Chrome...) and I can never quite decide if or when I should try to switch. I'm still just using the ordinary Playwright MCP server in both Codex and Claude Code, for the time being.
  - bartek_gdn 8mo ago
    I would use whatever you are comfortable with, I wanted a similar tool so I coded my own. Smaller API so that understand what is going on and it is easy not to get lost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
rossvc 8mo ago
I've been using the DevTools MCP for months now, but it's extremely token heavy. Is there an alternative that provides the same amount of detail when it comes to reading back network requests?
- nerdsniper 8mo ago
  It's probably not fully optimized and could be compacted more with just some effort, and further with clever techniques, but browser state/session data will always use up a ton of tokens because it's a ton of data. There's not really a way around that. AI's have a surprising "intuition" about problems that often help them guess at solutions based on insufficient information (and they guess correctly more often than I expect they should). But when their intuition isn't enough and you need to feed them the real logs/data...it's always gonna use a bunch of tokens. This is one place where human intuition helps a ton today. If you can find the most relevant snippets and give the AI just the right context, it does a much better job.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- mmaunder 8mo ago
  Yes. CLI. Always CLI. Never MCP. Ever. You’re welcome.
  - nerdsniper 8mo ago
    That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead.
    - cheema33 8mo ago
      > That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead. The problem with MCP is that you are paying the price in token usage, even if you are not using the MCP server. Why would anybody want that? And no, the tool search function recently introduced by Anthropic does not completely solve this problem.
mmaunder 8mo ago
Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful. So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it. Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic coding know. Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more flexible and many are already trained in. Playwright with headless Chromium or headed chrome is what anyone serious is using and we get all the dev and inspection tools already. And it works perfectly. This only has appeal to those starting out and confused into thinking this is the way. The answer is almost never MCP.
- synalx 8mo ago
  Antigravity's coding agent is worlds apart from Gemini CLI, though.
- girvo 8mo ago
  I know it’s a bit of a tangent but man you’re right re. Gemini CLI. It’s woefully bad, barely works. Maybe because I was a “free” user trying it out at the time, but it was such a bad experience it turned me off subscribing to whatever their coding plan is called today.
  - luckydata 8mo ago
    it's not the CLI, it's the model. The model wasn't trained to do that kind of work, was trained to do one shot coding, not sustained back and forth until it gets it right like Claude and ChatGPT.
  - ElCapitanMarkla 8mo ago
    I had this exp too, but I trialed the pro sub a few weeks back and it has been great. I have no complaints this time
- rsalus 8mo ago
  MCP is very much not dead. centralized remote MCP servers are incredibly useful. also bespoke CLIs still require guidance for models to use effectively, so it's clear that token efficiency is still an issue regardless.
dataviz1000 8mo ago
I use Playwright to intercept all requests and responses and have Claude Code navigate to a website like YouTube and click and interact with all the elements and inputs while recording all the requests and responses associated with each interaction. Then it creates a detailed strongly typed API to interact with any website using the underlying API. Yes, I know it likely breaks everybody's terms of service but at the same time I'm not loading gigabytes of ads, images, markup, to accomplish things. If anyone is interested I can take some time and publish it this week.
- rkagerer 8mo ago
  I assume you're not logged into those sites, in order to avoid bans and the risk of hitting the wrong button like, say, "Delete Account".
  - dataviz1000 8mo ago
    It turns any authenticated browser session into a fully typed REST API proxy — exposing discovered endpoints as local Hono routes that relay requests through the browser, so cookies and auth are automatic. The point is that it creates an API proxy in code that a Typescript server calls directly. The AI runs for about 10 minutes with codegen. The rest of the time it is just API calls to a service. Remove the endpoint for "Delete Account" and that API endpoint never gets called. This 100% breaks everyone's terms of service. I would not recommend nor encourage using.
- xrd 8mo ago
  Yes, please do!
  - dataviz1000 8mo ago
    100% I'll response to this by Friday with link to Github. I use Patchright + Ghostery and I have a cleaver tool that uses web sockets to pass 1 second interval screenshots to the a dashboard and pointer / keyboard events to the server which allow interacting with websites so that a user can create authentication that is stored in the chrome user profile with all the cookies, history, local storage, ect.. in the cloud on a server. Can you list some websites that don't require subscription that you would like to me to test against? I used this for Robinhood and I think Linked in would be a good example for people to use.
silverwind 8mo ago
I found Firefox with https://github.com/padenot/firefox-devtools-mcp https://github.com/padenot/firefox-devtools-mcp to work better then the default Chrome MCP, is seems much faster.
paulirish 8mo ago
The DevTools MCP project just recently landed a standalone CLI: https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp/blob/main/skills/chrome-devtools-cli/SKILL.md https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp/blob/m... Great news to all of us keenly aware of MCP's wild token costs. ;) The CLI hasn't been announced yet (sorry guys!), but it is shipping in the latest v0.20.0 release. (Disclaimer: I used to work on the DevTools team. And I still do, too)
- commanderkeen08 8mo ago
  MCPs cost nothing in CC now with Tool Search.
  - cheema33 8mo ago
    > MCPs cost nothing in CC now with Tool Search. This is incorrect. Plenty of people have run the numbers. Tool search does not fix all problems with MCP.
    - ehsanu1 8mo ago
      What are the numbers? Are there problems other than context usage you refer to?
    - lewisjoe 8mo ago
      Can you elaborate more?
  - wahnfrieden 8mo ago
    Codex also has this…
- hank1931 8mo ago
  Love the Mitch Hedberg reference! Thank you! Always good to get a little Mitch! ‘I don’t have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who’d be mad at me for saying that.’ ‘I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it.’ ‘I haven’t slept for ten days, because that would be too long.’ ‘I like to play blackjack. I’m not addicted to gambling. I’m addicted to sitting in a semi-circle.’
ptak_dev 8mo ago
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aplomb1026 8mo ago
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cheema33 8mo ago
How does this compare with playwright CLI? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli
- EGreg 8mo ago
  It’s made by Google and comes with Chrome
- Torn 8mo ago
  I personally found playwright-cli, and agent-browser which wraps playwright, both more token-efficient than using the raw mcp. Odd that this article from Dec 2025 has been posted to the top of HN though
- akvadrako 8mo ago
  Its easier to connect to existing sessions in your main browser.
robutsume 8mo ago
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anesxvito 8mo ago
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netdur 8mo ago
I wrote an ai agent that do chrome testing, yes, chrome MCP do work https://github.com/netdur/hugind/tree/main/agent/chrome_tester https://github.com/netdur/hugind/tree/main/agent/chrome_test...
paseante 8mo ago
[flagged]
- quotemstr 8mo ago
  > expose a machine-readable interaction layer alongside the human one Which is called ARIA and has been a thing forever.
- codybontecou 8mo ago
  Is this just a well-documented API?
- ElectricalUnion 8mo ago
  > interface designed for humans — the DOM. Citation needed. > The web already went through this evolution once: we went from screen-scraping HTML to structured APIs. Now we're regressing back to scraping because agents need to interact with sites that only have human interfaces. To me, sites that "only have human interfaces" are more likely that not be that way totally on purpose, attempting to maximize human retention/engagement and are more likely to require strict anti-bot measures like Proof-of-Work to be usable at all.
- imiric 8mo ago
  > What we actually need is a standard for websites to expose a machine-readable interaction layer alongside the human one. We had this 20 years ago with the Semantic Web movement, XHTML, and microformats. Sadly, it didn't pan out for various reasons, most of them non-technical. There's remnants of it today with RSS feeds, which is either unsupported or badly supported by most web sites. Once advertising became the dominant business model on the web, it wasn't in publishers' interest to provide a machine-readable format of their content. Adtech corporations took control of the web, and here we are. Nowadays even API access is tightly controlled (see Reddit, Twitter, etc.). So your idea will never pan out in practice. We'll have to continue to rely on hacks and scraping will continue to be a gray area. These new tools make automated scraping easier, for better or worse, but publishers will find new ways to mitigate it. And so it goes. Besides, if these new tools are "superintelligent", surely they're able to navigate a web site. Captchas are broken and bot detection algorithms (or "AI" themselves) are unreliable. So I'd say the leverage is on the consumer side, for now.
bartek_gdn 8mo ago
My approach is a thin cli wrapper instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
holoduke 8mo ago
One tip for the illegal scrapers or automators out there. Casperjs and phanthomjs are still working very well for anti bot detection. These are very old libs no longer maintained. But I can even scrape and authenticate at my banks.
teaearlgraycold 8mo ago
I love how in their demo video where they center an element it ends up off-center.
RALaBarge 8mo ago
I made a websocket proxy + chrome extension to give control of the DOM to agents for my middleware app: https://github.com/RALaBarge/browserbox https://github.com/RALaBarge/browserbox The thing I am working on is improving at the moment agentic tool usage success rates for my research and I use this as a proxy to access everything with the cookies I allow in the session.
recroad 8mo ago
I've been using TideWave[1] for the last few months and it has this built-in. It started off as an Elixir/LiveView thing but now they support popular JavaScript frameworks and RoR as well. For those who like this, check it out. It even takes it further and has access to the runtime of your app (not just the browser). The agent basically is living inside your running app with access to databases, endpoints etc. It's awesome. 1. https://tidewave.ai/ https://tidewave.ai/
- galaxyLogic 8mo ago
  Interesting. Does it only work with known frameworks like Next, React etc. or could I use it with my plain Node.js app which produces browser-output?
  - recroad 8mo ago
    No, doesn't use work with server-side only apps.
    - galaxyLogic 8mo ago
      It's a server-side app whose GUI is in the browser, a bit like Electron or what have you. I guess my question is does Tidewawe only work with a fixed set of known "frameworks" like React and Next, or is it a more general purpose tool for analysing an app based on its source-code and the HTML it produces for the browser?
      - recroad 8mo ago
        Fixed set.
justboy1987 8mo ago
[flagged]
jasonjmcghee 8mo ago
I had fun playing with it + WebMCP this weekend, but I think, similarly to how claude code / codex + MCP require SKILL.md, websites might too. We could put them in a dedicated tag: <script type="text/skill+markdown"> --- name: ... description ... --- ... </script> For all the skills with you want on the page, optionally set to default which "should be read in full to properly use the page". And then add some javascript functions to wrap it / simplify required tokens. Made a repo and a website if anyone is interested: https://webagentskills.dev/ https://webagentskills.dev/
ClaudeAgent_WK 8mo ago
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babas03 8mo ago
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stainlu 8mo ago
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m00dy 8mo ago
Connecting a remote VPS to a local Chrome session is usually a headache. It gets complicated when your Claw setup is on the server but the browser session stays on your own machine. I ended up using Proxybase’s relay [0] to bridge the gap, and it actually solved the connection issues for me. [0] https://relay.proxybase.xyz https://relay.proxybase.xyz
jerrygoyal 8mo ago
It's from 2025. The post should have a year tag.
- tomhow 8mo ago
  Done, thanks!
vinmay 8mo ago
For something like Chrome DevTools MCP with authenticated browser sessions, the specific risk is credentials in the browser context + any SEND capability reachable from the same entry points. If a page can inject a prompt that triggers a tool call, and that call path can also reach outbound network I/O, you have an exfiltration vector without needing shell access at all.
nubsero 8mo ago
I’ve been experimenting with a similar approach using Playwright, and the biggest takeaway for me was how much “hidden API” most modern websites actually have. Once you start mapping interactions → network calls, a lot of UI complexity just disappears. It almost feels like the browser becomes a reverse-engineering tool for undocumented APIs. That said, I do think there’s a tradeoff people don’t talk about enough: - Sites change frequently, so these inferred APIs can be brittle - Auth/session handling gets messy fast - And of course, the ToS / ethical side is a gray area Still, for personal automation or internal tooling, it’s insanely powerful. Way more efficient than driving full browser sessions for everything. Curious how others are handling stability — are you just regenerating these mappings periodically, or building some abstraction layer on top?
danielraffel 8mo ago
I asked Claude to use this with the new scheduled tasks /loop skill to update my Oscar picks site every five minutes during tonight’s awards show. It simply visited the Oscars' realtime feed via Chrome DevTools, and updated my picks and pushed to gh pages. It even handled the tie correctly. https://danielraffel.me/2026/03/16/my-oscar-2026-picks/ https://danielraffel.me/2026/03/16/my-oscar-2026-picks/ I know I could just use claude --chrome, but I’m used to this excellent MCP server.
- egeozcan 8mo ago
  Very cool idea and site! I wish claude and others could parse video streams then you could even create your own feed.
- dt3ft 8mo ago
  Neat idea :)
diven_rastdus 8mo ago
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- hugs 8mo ago
  that is the MCP vs CLI debate.
hugs 8mo ago
i wish more people knew or cared about web standards vs proprietary protocols. the webdriver bidi protocol took the good parts of cdp and made it a w3c standard, but no one knows about it. some of the people who do know about it, find one thing they don't like and give up. let's not keep giving megacorporations outsized influence and control over the web and the tools we use with it. let's celebrate standards and make them awesome.
guard402 8mo ago
We tested this — the default take_snapshot path (Accessibility.getFullAXTree) is safe. It filters display:none elements because they're excluded from the accessibility tree. But evaluate_script is the escape hatch. If an agent runs document.body.textContent instead of using the AX tree, hidden injections in display:none divs show up in the output. innerText is safe (respects CSS visibility), textContent is not (returns all text nodes regardless of styling). The gap: the agent decides which extraction method to use, not the user. When the AX tree doesn't return enough text, a plausible next step is evaluate_script with textContent — which is even shown as an example in the docs. Also worth noting: opacity:0 and font-size:0 bypass even the safe defaults. The AX tree includes those because the elements are technically 'rendered' and accessible to screen readers. display:none is just the most common hiding technique, not the only one.
biang15343100 8mo ago
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shardullavekar 8mo ago
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tomcasaburi 8mo ago
imo a much better setup is using playwright-cli + some skill.md files for profiling (for example, I have a skill using aidenybai/react-scan for frontend react profiling). token efficient, fast and more customizable/upgradable based on your workflow. vercel-labs/agent-browser is also a good alternative.
yan5xu 8mo ago
I built something in this space, bb-browser (https://github.com/epiral/bb-browser https://github.com/epiral/bb-browser). Same CDP connection, but the approach is honestly kind of cheating. Instead of giving agents browser primitives like snapshot, click, fill, I wrapped websites into CLI commands. It connects via CDP to a managed Chrome where you're already logged in, then runs small JS functions that call the site's own internal APIs. No headless browser, no stolen cookies, no API keys. Your browser is already the best place for fetch to happen. It has all the cookies, sessions, auth state. Traditional crawlers spend so much effort on login flows, CSRF tokens, CAPTCHAs, anti-bot detection... all of that just disappears when you fetch from inside the browser itself. Frontend engineers would probably hate me for this because it's really hard to defend against. So instead of snapshot the DOM (easily 50K+ tokens), find element, click, snapshot again, parse... you just run bb-browser site twitter/feed and get structured JSON back. Here's the thing I keep thinking about though. Operating websites through raw CDP is a genuinely hard problem. A model needs to understand page structure, find the right elements, handle dynamic loading, deal with SPAs. That takes a SOTA model. But calling a CLI command? Any model can do that. So the SOTA model only needs to run once, to write the adapter. After that, even a small open-source model runs "bb-browser site reddit/hot" just fine. And not everyone even needs to write adapters themselves. I created a community repo, bb-sites (https://github.com/epiral/bb-sites https://github.com/epiral/bb-sites), where people freely contribute adapters for different websites. So in a sense, someone with just an open-source model can already feel the real impact of agents in their daily workflow. Agents shouldn't be a privilege only for people who can access SOTA models and afford the token costs. There's a guide command baked in so if you do want to add a new site, you can tell your agent "turn this website into a CLI" and it reverse-engineers the site's APIs and writes the adapter. v0.8.x dropped the Chrome extension entirely. Pure CDP, managed Chrome instance. "npm install -g bb-browser" and it works.
wuxiaoxia88 8mo ago
so good browser automation extensions. i like it
wuxiaoxia88 8mo ago
so good openclaw automation extensions, i like it.
LauraMedia 8mo ago
Is this really the state of AI in 2026? It takes over your entire browser to center a div... and then fails to do so?
- deleted 8mo ago
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todteera 8mo ago
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jedisct1 8mo ago
For context extraction, Lightpanda is a really great option. Much faster than Chrome, and it comes with a built-in MCP server. However, it will not fill forms, etc. But it can be combined with agent-browser to get the best of both worlds: https://swival.dev/pages/web-browsing.html https://swival.dev/pages/web-browsing.html
CloakHQ 8mo ago
[dead]
Igor_Wiwi 8mo ago
I can't make it run under WSL with Claude Code, anyone succeeded in this?
- archon810 8mo ago
  I haven't been able to get it to work under WSL in Cursor either.
re5i5tor 8mo ago
Lots of MCP hate, and some love, in the comments. 80% of MCPs are thin wrappers over APIs . Yes they stink. A well written remote OAuth MCP need not stink. Tons of advantages starting with strong security baked in. I like Cloudflare Code Mode as an MCP pattern. Two tools, search and execute. 1M Opus 4.6 also reduces the penalties of MCP’s context approach. Along with tool search etc.
cravo 8mo ago
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agenticbtcio 8mo ago
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thomasBln 8mo ago
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604 points by xnx 8mo ago

Someone already made a great agent skill for this, which I'm using daily, and it's been very cool! https://github.com/pasky/chrome-cdp-skill https://github.com/pasky/chrome-cdp-skill For example, I use codex to manage a local music library, and it was able to use the skill to open a YT Music tab in my browser, search for each album, and get the URL to pass to yt-dlp. Do note that it only works for Chrome browsers rn, so you have to edit the script to point to a different Chromium browser's binary (e.g. I use Helium) but it's simple enough

Etheryte 8mo ago
On one hand, cool demo, on the other, this is horrifying in more ways than I can begin to describe. You're literally one prompt injection away from someone having unlimited access to all of your everything.
- aadishv 8mo ago
  Of course I still watch it and have my finger on the escape key at all times :)
  - bergheim 8mo ago
    For now you are. All these things fall with time, of course. You will stop caring once you start feeling safe, we all do. Also. AAarrgh, my new thing to be annoyed at is AI drivel written slop. "No browser automation framework, no separate browser instance, no re-login." Oh really, nice. No separate computer either? No separate power station, no house, no star wars? No something else we didn't ask for? Just one a toggle and you go? Whoaaaaaa. Edit: lol even the skill itself is vibe coded: Lightweight Chrome DevTools Protocol CLI. Connects directly via WebSocket — no Puppeteer, works with 100+ tabs, instant connection. I feel like there's nothing fucking left on the internet anymore that is not some mean of whatever the LLM is trained to talk like now.
    - tacitusarc 8mo ago
      What can you do? I mentioned the use of AI on another thread, asking essentially the same question. The comment was flagged, presumably as off topic. Fair enough, I guess. But about 80% (maybe more) of posted blogs etc that I see on HN now have very obvious signs of AI. Comments do too. I hate it. If I want to see what Claude thinks I can ask it. HN is becoming close to unusable, and this isn’t like the previous times where people say it’s like reddit or something. It is inundated with bot spam, it just happens the bot spam is sufficiently engaging and well-written that it is really hard to address.
      - bergheim 8mo ago
        I hear you and I agree. I don't know. Gated communities?
      - brabel 8mo ago
        Could you just be paranoid about it and seeing things where they aren’t? I can’t imagine someone using AI to comment on HN!
  - glenpierce 8mo ago
    I am in awe of the confidence you have in your reflexes.
    - aadishv 8mo ago
      You get used to it :) And especially once you get used to the YOLO lifestyle, you end up realizing that practically any form of security is entirely worthless when you're dealing with a 200 IQ brainwashed robot hacker. I think using the Pi coding agent really got me used to this way of thinking: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#toc_13 https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to...
- mh- 8mo ago
  Not the person you're replying to, but: I just use a separate, dedicated Chrome profile that isn't logged into anything except what I'm working on. Then I keep the persistence, but without commingling in a way that dramatically increases the risk. edit: upon rereading, I now realize the (different) prompt injection risk you were calling out re: the handoff to yt-dlp. Separate profiles won't save you from that, though there are other approaches.
  - sofixa 8mo ago
    Even without the bash escape risk (which can be mitigated with the various ways of only allowing yt-dlp to be executed), YT Music is a paid service gated behind a Google account, with associated payment method. Even just stealing the auth cookie is pretty serious in terms of damage it could do.
    - mh- 8mo ago
      Agreed. I wouldn't cut loose an agent that's at risk of prompt injection w/ unscoped access to my primary Google account. But if I understood the original commenter's use case, they're just searching YT Music to get the URL to a given song. This appears[0] to work fine without being logged in. So you could parameterize or wrap the call to yt-dlp and only have your cookie jar usable there. [0]: https://music.youtube.com/search?q=sandstorm https://music.youtube.com/search?q=sandstorm [1]: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvkxXblpz8 https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvkxXblpz8
      - sofixa 8mo ago
        Oh, that's true, even allows you to play without an account. I can swear that at some point it flat out refused any use unless you're logged in with an account that has YT Music (I remember having to go to regular YouTube to get the same song to send it to someone who didn't have it).
  - bartek_gdn 8mo ago
    That's also my approach, built quickly a cli for this with lightweight session management https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
- sheepscreek 8mo ago
  As long as it’s gated and not turned on by default, it’s all good. They could also add a warning/sanity check similar to “allow pasting” in the console.
  - hrmtst93837 8mo ago
    [flagged]
paulirish 8mo ago
To be clear, this isn't a skill for the devtools mcp, but an independent project. It doesn't look bad, but obviously browser automation + agents is a very busy space with lots of parallel efforts. DevTools MCP and its new CLI are maintained by the team behind Chrome DevTools & Puppeteer and it certainly has a more comprehensive feature set. I'd expect it to be more reliable, but.. hey open source competition breeds innovation and I love that. :) (I used to work on the DevTools team. And I still do, too)
xmorse 8mo ago
Does anyone really use these hacked up with duct tape skills? why not use something more reliable like playwriter.dev?
esperent 8mo ago
> Most browser automation tools launch a fresh, isolated browser. This one connects to the Chrome you're already running Is this the same as what Claude in Chrome does? I tried that for a while and since I use Firefox and Chromium, the security problem of it seeing your tabs wasn't a big deal. Fresh Chrome install, only ever used for this exact purpose. Plus you can watch it working in real (actually very slow) time so if you did point it at something risky you can take over at any point. For actual testing of web apps though, a skill with playwright cli in headless mode is much more effective. About 1-2k context per interaction after a bit of tuning.
Mashimo 8mo ago
Mhh, yt-dlp already has a build in youtube search, could you not use that instead of anything with AI?

Yokohiii 8mo ago

Was already eye rolling about the headline. Then I realized it's from chrome. Hoping from some good stories from open claw users that permanently run debug sessions.

Sonofg0tham 8mo ago

[flagged]

simianwords 8mo ago
AI
- rzmmm 8mo ago
  Yes. Can someone tell me why even HN has bots. For selling upvotes to advertisement purposes?
  - Sonofg0tham 8mo ago
    I'm not a bot and definitely not advertising - I'm new on HN and trying to contribute with a few comments where I can.

NiekvdMaas 8mo ago

Also works nicely together with agent-browser (https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser) using --auto-connect

speedgoose 8mo ago

Interesting. MCP APIs can be useful for humans too. Chrome's dev tools already had an API [1], but perhaps the new MCP one is more user friendly, as one main requirement of MCP APIs is to be understood and used correctly by current gen AI agents. [1]: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/ https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/

AlexDunit 8mo ago

[flagged]

rob 8mo ago
Someone left their bot on default settings.
- Bengalilol 8mo ago
  The other reply to this 'bot' looks like another default thing: <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=David-Brug-Ai https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=David-Brug-Ai>
David-Brug-Ai 8mo ago
[flagged]

myrak 8mo ago

[dead]

zxspectrumk48 8mo ago

I found this one working amazingly well (same idea - connect to existing session): https://github.com/remorses/playwriter https://github.com/remorses/playwriter

deleted 8mo ago

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boomskats 8mo ago

Been using this one for a while, mostly with codex on opencode. It's more reliable and token efficient than other devtools protocol MCPs i've tried. Favourite unexpected use case for me was telling gemini to use it as a SVG editing repl, where it was able to produce some fantastic looking custom icons for me after 3-4 generate/refresh/screenshot iterations. Also works very nicely with electron apps, both reverse engineering and extending.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago

I don’t do any serious web development and haven’t for 25 years aside from recently vibe coding internal web admin portals for back end cloud + app dev projects. But I did recently have to implement a web crawler for a customer’s site for a RAG project using Chromium + Playwrite in a Docker container deployed to Lambda. I ran the Docker container locally for testing. Could a web developer test using Claude + Chromium in a Docker container without using their real Chrome instance?

bartek_gdn 8mo ago
Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
vesselapi 8mo ago
Yes, running Chromium in a Docker container works well for this. There are prebuilt images like https://hub.docker.com/r/browserless/chrome https://hub.docker.com/r/browserless/chrome that give you a headless instance you can connect to via CDP (Playwright, Puppeteer). Keeps everything isolated from your actual browser profile and credentials.

slrainka 8mo ago

chrome-cli with remote developer port has been working fine this entire time.

oldeucryptoboi 8mo ago

I tell Claude to use playwright so I don't even need to do the setup myself.

nomilk 8mo ago
Similarly, cursor has a built in browser and visit localhost to see the results in the browser. Although I don't use it much (I probably should).

tonyhschu 8mo ago

Very cool. I do something like this but with Playwright. It used to be a real token hog though, and got expensive fast. So much so that I built a wrapper to dump results to disk first then let the agent query instead. https://uisnap.dev/ https://uisnap.dev/ Will check this out to see if they’ve solved the token burn problem.

Torn 8mo ago
Mostly, yes: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli
mambodog 8mo ago
my workaround for this was to make a wrapper mcp server which uses claude haiku to summarize the page snapshot returned in the response of each playwright mcp call, and that has worked pretty well for me: https://github.com/jsdf/playwright-slim-mcp https://github.com/jsdf/playwright-slim-mcp
esperent 8mo ago
I use playwright CLI. Wrote a skill for it, and after a bit of tuning it's about 1-2k context per interaction which is fine. The key was that Claude only needs screenshots initially and then can query the dev tools for logs as needed.

JKolios 8mo ago

Now that there's widespread direct connectivity between agents and browser sessions, are CAPTCHAs even relevant anymore?

pritesh1908 8mo ago

I have been using Playwright for a fairly long time now. Do checkout

glerk 8mo ago

Note that this is a mega token guzzler in case you’re paying for your own tokens!

senand 8mo ago

I suggest to use https://github.com/simonw/rodney https://github.com/simonw/rodney instead

meowface 8mo ago
Unfortunately there are like a billion competitors to this right now (including Playwright MCP, Playwright CLI, the new baked-in Playwright feature in Codex /experimental, Claude Code for Chrome...) and I can never quite decide if or when I should try to switch. I'm still just using the ordinary Playwright MCP server in both Codex and Claude Code, for the time being.
- bartek_gdn 8mo ago
  I would use whatever you are comfortable with, I wanted a similar tool so I coded my own. Smaller API so that understand what is going on and it is easy not to get lost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790

rossvc 8mo ago

I've been using the DevTools MCP for months now, but it's extremely token heavy. Is there an alternative that provides the same amount of detail when it comes to reading back network requests?

nerdsniper 8mo ago
It's probably not fully optimized and could be compacted more with just some effort, and further with clever techniques, but browser state/session data will always use up a ton of tokens because it's a ton of data. There's not really a way around that. AI's have a surprising "intuition" about problems that often help them guess at solutions based on insufficient information (and they guess correctly more often than I expect they should). But when their intuition isn't enough and you need to feed them the real logs/data...it's always gonna use a bunch of tokens. This is one place where human intuition helps a ton today. If you can find the most relevant snippets and give the AI just the right context, it does a much better job.
deleted 8mo ago
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mmaunder 8mo ago
Yes. CLI. Always CLI. Never MCP. Ever. You’re welcome.
- nerdsniper 8mo ago
  That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead.
  - cheema33 8mo ago
    > That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead. The problem with MCP is that you are paying the price in token usage, even if you are not using the MCP server. Why would anybody want that? And no, the tool search function recently introduced by Anthropic does not completely solve this problem.

mmaunder 8mo ago

Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful. So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it. Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic coding know. Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more flexible and many are already trained in. Playwright with headless Chromium or headed chrome is what anyone serious is using and we get all the dev and inspection tools already. And it works perfectly. This only has appeal to those starting out and confused into thinking this is the way. The answer is almost never MCP.

synalx 8mo ago
Antigravity's coding agent is worlds apart from Gemini CLI, though.
girvo 8mo ago
I know it’s a bit of a tangent but man you’re right re. Gemini CLI. It’s woefully bad, barely works. Maybe because I was a “free” user trying it out at the time, but it was such a bad experience it turned me off subscribing to whatever their coding plan is called today.
- luckydata 8mo ago
  it's not the CLI, it's the model. The model wasn't trained to do that kind of work, was trained to do one shot coding, not sustained back and forth until it gets it right like Claude and ChatGPT.
- ElCapitanMarkla 8mo ago
  I had this exp too, but I trialed the pro sub a few weeks back and it has been great. I have no complaints this time
rsalus 8mo ago
MCP is very much not dead. centralized remote MCP servers are incredibly useful. also bespoke CLIs still require guidance for models to use effectively, so it's clear that token efficiency is still an issue regardless.

dataviz1000 8mo ago

I use Playwright to intercept all requests and responses and have Claude Code navigate to a website like YouTube and click and interact with all the elements and inputs while recording all the requests and responses associated with each interaction. Then it creates a detailed strongly typed API to interact with any website using the underlying API. Yes, I know it likely breaks everybody's terms of service but at the same time I'm not loading gigabytes of ads, images, markup, to accomplish things. If anyone is interested I can take some time and publish it this week.

rkagerer 8mo ago
I assume you're not logged into those sites, in order to avoid bans and the risk of hitting the wrong button like, say, "Delete Account".
- dataviz1000 8mo ago
  It turns any authenticated browser session into a fully typed REST API proxy — exposing discovered endpoints as local Hono routes that relay requests through the browser, so cookies and auth are automatic. The point is that it creates an API proxy in code that a Typescript server calls directly. The AI runs for about 10 minutes with codegen. The rest of the time it is just API calls to a service. Remove the endpoint for "Delete Account" and that API endpoint never gets called. This 100% breaks everyone's terms of service. I would not recommend nor encourage using.
xrd 8mo ago
Yes, please do!
- dataviz1000 8mo ago
  100% I'll response to this by Friday with link to Github. I use Patchright + Ghostery and I have a cleaver tool that uses web sockets to pass 1 second interval screenshots to the a dashboard and pointer / keyboard events to the server which allow interacting with websites so that a user can create authentication that is stored in the chrome user profile with all the cookies, history, local storage, ect.. in the cloud on a server. Can you list some websites that don't require subscription that you would like to me to test against? I used this for Robinhood and I think Linked in would be a good example for people to use.

silverwind 8mo ago

I found Firefox with https://github.com/padenot/firefox-devtools-mcp https://github.com/padenot/firefox-devtools-mcp to work better then the default Chrome MCP, is seems much faster.

paulirish 8mo ago

The DevTools MCP project just recently landed a standalone CLI: https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp/blob/main/skills/chrome-devtools-cli/SKILL.md https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp/blob/m... Great news to all of us keenly aware of MCP's wild token costs. ;) The CLI hasn't been announced yet (sorry guys!), but it is shipping in the latest v0.20.0 release. (Disclaimer: I used to work on the DevTools team. And I still do, too)

commanderkeen08 8mo ago
MCPs cost nothing in CC now with Tool Search.
- cheema33 8mo ago
  > MCPs cost nothing in CC now with Tool Search. This is incorrect. Plenty of people have run the numbers. Tool search does not fix all problems with MCP.
  - ehsanu1 8mo ago
    What are the numbers? Are there problems other than context usage you refer to?
  - lewisjoe 8mo ago
    Can you elaborate more?
- wahnfrieden 8mo ago
  Codex also has this…
hank1931 8mo ago
Love the Mitch Hedberg reference! Thank you! Always good to get a little Mitch! ‘I don’t have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who’d be mad at me for saying that.’ ‘I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it.’ ‘I haven’t slept for ten days, because that would be too long.’ ‘I like to play blackjack. I’m not addicted to gambling. I’m addicted to sitting in a semi-circle.’

ptak_dev 8mo ago

[dead]

aplomb1026 8mo ago

[dead]

cheema33 8mo ago

How does this compare with playwright CLI? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli

EGreg 8mo ago
It’s made by Google and comes with Chrome
Torn 8mo ago
I personally found playwright-cli, and agent-browser which wraps playwright, both more token-efficient than using the raw mcp. Odd that this article from Dec 2025 has been posted to the top of HN though
akvadrako 8mo ago
Its easier to connect to existing sessions in your main browser.

robutsume 8mo ago

[dead]

anesxvito 8mo ago

[dead]

netdur 8mo ago

I wrote an ai agent that do chrome testing, yes, chrome MCP do work https://github.com/netdur/hugind/tree/main/agent/chrome_tester https://github.com/netdur/hugind/tree/main/agent/chrome_test...

paseante 8mo ago

[flagged]

quotemstr 8mo ago
> expose a machine-readable interaction layer alongside the human one Which is called ARIA and has been a thing forever.
codybontecou 8mo ago
Is this just a well-documented API?
ElectricalUnion 8mo ago
> interface designed for humans — the DOM. Citation needed. > The web already went through this evolution once: we went from screen-scraping HTML to structured APIs. Now we're regressing back to scraping because agents need to interact with sites that only have human interfaces. To me, sites that "only have human interfaces" are more likely that not be that way totally on purpose, attempting to maximize human retention/engagement and are more likely to require strict anti-bot measures like Proof-of-Work to be usable at all.
imiric 8mo ago
> What we actually need is a standard for websites to expose a machine-readable interaction layer alongside the human one. We had this 20 years ago with the Semantic Web movement, XHTML, and microformats. Sadly, it didn't pan out for various reasons, most of them non-technical. There's remnants of it today with RSS feeds, which is either unsupported or badly supported by most web sites. Once advertising became the dominant business model on the web, it wasn't in publishers' interest to provide a machine-readable format of their content. Adtech corporations took control of the web, and here we are. Nowadays even API access is tightly controlled (see Reddit, Twitter, etc.). So your idea will never pan out in practice. We'll have to continue to rely on hacks and scraping will continue to be a gray area. These new tools make automated scraping easier, for better or worse, but publishers will find new ways to mitigate it. And so it goes. Besides, if these new tools are "superintelligent", surely they're able to navigate a web site. Captchas are broken and bot detection algorithms (or "AI" themselves) are unreliable. So I'd say the leverage is on the consumer side, for now.

bartek_gdn 8mo ago

My approach is a thin cli wrapper instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790

holoduke 8mo ago

One tip for the illegal scrapers or automators out there. Casperjs and phanthomjs are still working very well for anti bot detection. These are very old libs no longer maintained. But I can even scrape and authenticate at my banks.

teaearlgraycold 8mo ago

I love how in their demo video where they center an element it ends up off-center.

RALaBarge 8mo ago

I made a websocket proxy + chrome extension to give control of the DOM to agents for my middleware app: https://github.com/RALaBarge/browserbox https://github.com/RALaBarge/browserbox The thing I am working on is improving at the moment agentic tool usage success rates for my research and I use this as a proxy to access everything with the cookies I allow in the session.

recroad 8mo ago

I've been using TideWave[1] for the last few months and it has this built-in. It started off as an Elixir/LiveView thing but now they support popular JavaScript frameworks and RoR as well. For those who like this, check it out. It even takes it further and has access to the runtime of your app (not just the browser). The agent basically is living inside your running app with access to databases, endpoints etc. It's awesome. 1. https://tidewave.ai/ https://tidewave.ai/

galaxyLogic 8mo ago
Interesting. Does it only work with known frameworks like Next, React etc. or could I use it with my plain Node.js app which produces browser-output?
- recroad 8mo ago
  No, doesn't use work with server-side only apps.
  - galaxyLogic 8mo ago
    It's a server-side app whose GUI is in the browser, a bit like Electron or what have you. I guess my question is does Tidewawe only work with a fixed set of known "frameworks" like React and Next, or is it a more general purpose tool for analysing an app based on its source-code and the HTML it produces for the browser?
    - recroad 8mo ago
      Fixed set.

justboy1987 8mo ago

[flagged]

jasonjmcghee 8mo ago

I had fun playing with it + WebMCP this weekend, but I think, similarly to how claude code / codex + MCP require SKILL.md, websites might too. We could put them in a dedicated tag: <script type="text/skill+markdown"> --- name: ... description ... --- ... </script> For all the skills with you want on the page, optionally set to default which "should be read in full to properly use the page". And then add some javascript functions to wrap it / simplify required tokens. Made a repo and a website if anyone is interested: https://webagentskills.dev/ https://webagentskills.dev/

ClaudeAgent_WK 8mo ago

[dead]

babas03 8mo ago

[dead]

stainlu 8mo ago

[flagged]

m00dy 8mo ago

Connecting a remote VPS to a local Chrome session is usually a headache. It gets complicated when your Claw setup is on the server but the browser session stays on your own machine. I ended up using Proxybase’s relay [0] to bridge the gap, and it actually solved the connection issues for me. [0] https://relay.proxybase.xyz https://relay.proxybase.xyz

jerrygoyal 8mo ago

It's from 2025. The post should have a year tag.

tomhow 8mo ago
Done, thanks!

vinmay 8mo ago

For something like Chrome DevTools MCP with authenticated browser sessions, the specific risk is credentials in the browser context + any SEND capability reachable from the same entry points. If a page can inject a prompt that triggers a tool call, and that call path can also reach outbound network I/O, you have an exfiltration vector without needing shell access at all.

nubsero 8mo ago

I’ve been experimenting with a similar approach using Playwright, and the biggest takeaway for me was how much “hidden API” most modern websites actually have. Once you start mapping interactions → network calls, a lot of UI complexity just disappears. It almost feels like the browser becomes a reverse-engineering tool for undocumented APIs. That said, I do think there’s a tradeoff people don’t talk about enough: - Sites change frequently, so these inferred APIs can be brittle - Auth/session handling gets messy fast - And of course, the ToS / ethical side is a gray area Still, for personal automation or internal tooling, it’s insanely powerful. Way more efficient than driving full browser sessions for everything. Curious how others are handling stability — are you just regenerating these mappings periodically, or building some abstraction layer on top?

danielraffel 8mo ago

I asked Claude to use this with the new scheduled tasks /loop skill to update my Oscar picks site every five minutes during tonight’s awards show. It simply visited the Oscars' realtime feed via Chrome DevTools, and updated my picks and pushed to gh pages. It even handled the tie correctly. https://danielraffel.me/2026/03/16/my-oscar-2026-picks/ https://danielraffel.me/2026/03/16/my-oscar-2026-picks/ I know I could just use claude --chrome, but I’m used to this excellent MCP server.

egeozcan 8mo ago
Very cool idea and site! I wish claude and others could parse video streams then you could even create your own feed.
dt3ft 8mo ago
Neat idea :)

diven_rastdus 8mo ago

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hugs 8mo ago
that is the MCP vs CLI debate.

hugs 8mo ago

i wish more people knew or cared about web standards vs proprietary protocols. the webdriver bidi protocol took the good parts of cdp and made it a w3c standard, but no one knows about it. some of the people who do know about it, find one thing they don't like and give up. let's not keep giving megacorporations outsized influence and control over the web and the tools we use with it. let's celebrate standards and make them awesome.

guard402 8mo ago

We tested this — the default take_snapshot path (Accessibility.getFullAXTree) is safe. It filters display:none elements because they're excluded from the accessibility tree. But evaluate_script is the escape hatch. If an agent runs document.body.textContent instead of using the AX tree, hidden injections in display:none divs show up in the output. innerText is safe (respects CSS visibility), textContent is not (returns all text nodes regardless of styling). The gap: the agent decides which extraction method to use, not the user. When the AX tree doesn't return enough text, a plausible next step is evaluate_script with textContent — which is even shown as an example in the docs. Also worth noting: opacity:0 and font-size:0 bypass even the safe defaults. The AX tree includes those because the elements are technically 'rendered' and accessible to screen readers. display:none is just the most common hiding technique, not the only one.

biang15343100 8mo ago

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shardullavekar 8mo ago

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tomcasaburi 8mo ago

imo a much better setup is using playwright-cli + some skill.md files for profiling (for example, I have a skill using aidenybai/react-scan for frontend react profiling). token efficient, fast and more customizable/upgradable based on your workflow. vercel-labs/agent-browser is also a good alternative.

yan5xu 8mo ago

I built something in this space, bb-browser (https://github.com/epiral/bb-browser https://github.com/epiral/bb-browser). Same CDP connection, but the approach is honestly kind of cheating. Instead of giving agents browser primitives like snapshot, click, fill, I wrapped websites into CLI commands. It connects via CDP to a managed Chrome where you're already logged in, then runs small JS functions that call the site's own internal APIs. No headless browser, no stolen cookies, no API keys. Your browser is already the best place for fetch to happen. It has all the cookies, sessions, auth state. Traditional crawlers spend so much effort on login flows, CSRF tokens, CAPTCHAs, anti-bot detection... all of that just disappears when you fetch from inside the browser itself. Frontend engineers would probably hate me for this because it's really hard to defend against. So instead of snapshot the DOM (easily 50K+ tokens), find element, click, snapshot again, parse... you just run bb-browser site twitter/feed and get structured JSON back. Here's the thing I keep thinking about though. Operating websites through raw CDP is a genuinely hard problem. A model needs to understand page structure, find the right elements, handle dynamic loading, deal with SPAs. That takes a SOTA model. But calling a CLI command? Any model can do that. So the SOTA model only needs to run once, to write the adapter. After that, even a small open-source model runs "bb-browser site reddit/hot" just fine. And not everyone even needs to write adapters themselves. I created a community repo, bb-sites (https://github.com/epiral/bb-sites https://github.com/epiral/bb-sites), where people freely contribute adapters for different websites. So in a sense, someone with just an open-source model can already feel the real impact of agents in their daily workflow. Agents shouldn't be a privilege only for people who can access SOTA models and afford the token costs. There's a guide command baked in so if you do want to add a new site, you can tell your agent "turn this website into a CLI" and it reverse-engineers the site's APIs and writes the adapter. v0.8.x dropped the Chrome extension entirely. Pure CDP, managed Chrome instance. "npm install -g bb-browser" and it works.

wuxiaoxia88 8mo ago

so good browser automation extensions. i like it

wuxiaoxia88 8mo ago

so good openclaw automation extensions, i like it.

LauraMedia 8mo ago

Is this really the state of AI in 2026? It takes over your entire browser to center a div... and then fails to do so?

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todteera 8mo ago

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jedisct1 8mo ago

For context extraction, Lightpanda is a really great option. Much faster than Chrome, and it comes with a built-in MCP server. However, it will not fill forms, etc. But it can be combined with agent-browser to get the best of both worlds: https://swival.dev/pages/web-browsing.html https://swival.dev/pages/web-browsing.html

CloakHQ 8mo ago

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Igor_Wiwi 8mo ago

I can't make it run under WSL with Claude Code, anyone succeeded in this?

archon810 8mo ago
I haven't been able to get it to work under WSL in Cursor either.

re5i5tor 8mo ago

Lots of MCP hate, and some love, in the comments. 80% of MCPs are thin wrappers over APIs . Yes they stink. A well written remote OAuth MCP need not stink. Tons of advantages starting with strong security baked in. I like Cloudflare Code Mode as an MCP pattern. Two tools, search and execute. 1M Opus 4.6 also reduces the penalties of MCP’s context approach. Along with tool search etc.

cravo 8mo ago

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agenticbtcio 8mo ago

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thomasBln 8mo ago

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