2) this project includes source for the local mcp server, but not for its chrome extension, which is likely bundling https://github.com/ruifigueira/playwright-crx without attribution
1. Yes, the extension uses an anonymous device ID and sends an analytics event when a tool call is used. You can inspect the network traffic to verify that zero personalized or identifying information is sent.
I collect anonymized usage data to get an idea of how often people are using the extension in the same way that websites count visitors. I split my time between many projects and having a sense of how many active users there are is helpful for deciding which ones to focus on.
2. The extension is completely written by me, and I wrote in this GitHub issue why the repo currently only contains the MCP server (in short, I use a monorepo that contains code used by all my extensions and extracting this extension and maintaining multiple monorepos while keeping them in sync would require quite a bit of work): https://github.com/BrowserMCP/mcp/issues/1#issuecomment-2784...
I understand that you're frustrated with the way I've built this project, but there's really nothing nefarious going on here. Cheers!
Hey, as a maker, I get it. You spent time building something, and you want to understand how it gets used. If you're not collecting personal info, there is nothing wrong with this.
Knee-jerk reactions aren't helpful. Yes, too much tracking is not good, but some tracking is definitely important to improving a product over time and focusing your efforts.
I don't sign a term sheet when I order at McDonalds but you can be damn sure they count how many big macs I order. Does that make them morally bankrupt? Or is it just a normal business operation that is actually totally reasonable?
This automatic sense of entitlement to surveil users is the absolute embodiment of the banality of evil.
It's 2025 - we want informed consent and voluntary participation with the default assumption that no, we do not want you watching over our shoulders, and no, you are not entitled to covertly harvest all the data you want and monetize that without notifying users or asking permissions. The whole ToS gotcha game is bullshit, and it's way past time for this behavior to stop.
Ignorance and inertia bolstering the status quo doesn't make it any less wrong to pile more bullshit like this onto the existing massive pile of bullshit we put up with. It's still bullshit.
You're making a huge jump from "gathering anonymous counters to understand how many people use the thing" to "harvest all the data you want and monetize it".
If they were tracking my identity across sites and actually selling it to the highest bidder that's one thing that we'll definitely agree on. This is so so far from that.
You're welcome to build and use your own MCP browser automation if you're so hostile to the developer that built something cool and free for you to use.
The supply chain vulnerability in any extension is obvious. The problems with telemetry - any at all - are wide ranging and it's crazy to me that people don't see this.
Any covert, involuntary, automatic surveillance of a person for any reason whatsoever should have a court order and legal authority behind it - it's gross and exposes the target to vulnerabilities they're not cognizant of.
For telemetry tracking user behavior to be useful at all, it's got to be associated with a user. The idea of telemetry anonymization is marketing speak for "we obfuscated it, we know deanonymization is trivial, but people are stupid, especially regulators."
Any anonymization done is sufficiently obfuscated such that corporate asses get covered in the case of any regulatory investigation. There's no legitimate, mathematically valid anonymization of user data that you could do without destroying the information that you're trying to get in the first place through these tools. This means that any aggregation of user data useful to a malicious actor will inevitably be compromised - the second Posthog or Amplitude become a desirable target, they'll get pwned and breached, and much handwringing will be done, and there will be no recourse or recompense for damages done.
The only strategy to prevent the dissemination of surveillance data is not to collect it in the first place. It should be illegal to collect the data without voluntary, user initiated participation, and any information collected should be ephemeral with regular inspection to ensure compliance. Any violation of user privacy should result in crippling fines, something like 5% of the value of the company per user per day of violation - if you can't responsibly manage the data, you shouldn't be collecting it.
This means all the automatic continuous development a/b testing intrusive corner cutting corporate bullshit would have to stop. Continually leaking surveillance data to malicious actors year over year with no repercussions has thoroughly demonstrated that people cannot be trusted with safekeeping data.
I will build and use my own automation if I need to, based on products that don't covertly, involuntarily, ignorantly surveil their users, without even being aware of potential for harm, and I'll continue to point it out when it shows up in random projects and products, because it's wrong and it should stop.
We should stop embracing the things that enshittify the world, and stop sacrificing things like "other people's privacy" for convenience or profit.
Keep in mind, extensions can update themselves at any time, including when they're bought out by someone else. In fact, I bet that's a huge draw... imagine buying an extension that "can read and modify data on all your websites" and then pushing an update that, oh I dunno, exfiltrates everyone's passwords from their gmail. How would most people even catch that?
DO NOT have any extensions running by default except "on click".
There should be at least some kind of static checker of extensions for their calls to fetch or other network APIs. The Web is just too permissive with updating code, you've got eval and much more. It would be great if browsers had only a narrow bottleneck through which code could be updated, and would ask the user first.
(That wouldn't really solve everything since there can be sleeper code that is "switched on" with certain data coming over the wire, but better than what we have now.)
It would be interesting if you could easily install browser extensions via a source repository URL (e.g. GitHub, or any git URL), then at least there would be more transparency about who/what you are trusting by installing it. Blindly trusting a mostly anonymous chrome store "install" button seems insane, since they don't do any significant policing. Wasn't the promise of safety one of the primary reasons Google started the chrome store?
Like user.script/grease monkey. It use to be that you could publish a reasonably large script and someone would review it. Even better was to start out simple then gradually update it so that existing users can continue reviewing by looking at the changes.
I think the permission system should be much more complicated so that the user gets a prompt that explains what is needed and why.
Furthermore there should be [paid] independent reviewers to sign off on extensions. This adds a lot of credibility, specially to a first time publication without users. That would also give app stores someone to talk to before deleting something. Nefarious actors working for app stores can have their credibility questioned.
Keep in mind, extensions can update themselves at any time
GP suggested only installing extensions you can build yourself from source. Most extensions that auto update do so via the Chrome store. If you install an extension from source, that won't happen.
"Avoids bot detection and CAPTCHAs by using your real browser fingerprint."
Yeah, not really.
I've used a similar system a few weeks back (one I wrote myself), having AI control my browser using my logged in session, and I started to get Captcha's during my human sessions in the browser and eventually I got blocked from a bunch of websites. Now that I've stopped using my browser session in that way, the blocks eventually went away, but be warned, you'll lose access yourself to websites doing this, it isn't a silver bullet.
About five years ago, maybe more, Google started sending me captchas if I ran too many repetitive searches. I could be wrong, but it feel like most large platforms have fairly sophisticated anti-bot/scraping stuff in place.
Google does the same to me: Don't they know, I keep modifying my searches because their results sucked so bad I had to try 30 times to find the piece of information I needed?
Remember when github disabled searches for users who aren‘t logged in? Well, they just set the threshold for searches to 0 these days so they have de-facto disabled them again, this time avoiding the shitstorm.
I really really hope there are. Not just because of people who need these provisions, but also for everyone else, as accessibility is the last line of defense for preserving end-user interoperability.
Screen readers need to see a de-bullshittified, machine-readable version of the site + this is required by law sometimes, and generally considered a nice thing to enable -> the site becomes not just screen-reader friendly, but end user automation-friendly in general.
(I don't know how long this will hold, though. LLMs are already capable of becoming a screen reader without any special provisions - they can make sense of the UI the same way a sighted person can. I wouldn't trust them much now, but they'll only get better.)
What do you think they might be looking for that could be detected pretty quickly? I'm wondering if it is something like they can track mouse movement and calculate when a mouse is moving too cleanly, so adding some more human like noise to the mouse movement can better bypass the system. Others have mentioned doing too many actions too fast, but what about potential timing between actions. Even if every click isn't that fast, if they have a very consistent delay that would be another non-human sign.
Modern captchas use a number of tools including many of the approaches you mentioned. This why you might sometimes see a CloudFlare "I am not a robot" checkbox that checks itself and moves along before you have much time to even react. It's looking at a number of signals to determine that you're probably human before you've even checked the box.
When I am using keyboard navigation, shortcuts and autofills, I seem to get mistaken for a bot a lot. These Captchas are really bad at detecting bots and really good at falsely labelling humans as bots.
With AI feeding / scraping traffic to sites growing ridiculously fast, I think captchas & their equivalent are only going to be on the rise, and given the rise in so many people selling residential proxies I see, I don't doubt that measures and counter-measures on both sides are getting more and more sophisticated.
> These Captchas are really bad at detecting bots and really good at falsely labelling humans as bots.
As a human it feels that way to you. I suspect their false-positive rate is very low.
Of course, you may well be right that you get pinged more because of your style of browsing, which sux.
They're detecting patterns predominantly bots use. The fact that some humans also use them doesn't change that.
Back when I was playing Call of Duty 4, I got routinely accused of cheating because some people didn't think it was possible to click the mouse button as fast as I did.
To them it looked like I had some auto-trigger bot or Xbox controller.
I did in fact just have a good mouse and a quick finger.
What's different is the badness of the outcome: if children mislabel you as a cheater in CoD, you may get kicked from the server.
If CloudFlare mislabels you as a bot, however, you may be unable to access medical services, or your bank account, or unable to check in for a flight, stuff like that. Actual important things.
So yes, I think it's not unreasonable to expect more from CF. The fact that some humans are routinely mischaracterized as bots should be a blocker level issue.
Does it suck? Yes, absolutely. Should CF continuously work to reduce false positives? Yes, absolutely.
I've never failed the CF bot test so don't know how that feels. Though I have managed to get to level 8 or 9 on Google's ReCaptcha in recent times, and actually given up a couple of times.
Though my point was just it's gonna boil down to a duck test, so if you walk like a duck and quack like a duck, CF might just think you're a duck.
> I'm wondering if it is something like they can track mouse movement
Yes, this is a big signal they use.
> adding some more human like noise to the mouse
Yes, this is a standard avoidance strategy. Easier said than done. For every new noise generation method, they work on detection. They also detect more global usage patterns and other signals, so you'd need to immitate the entire workflow of being human. At least within the noise of their current models.
There's also the whole issue of captchas being in place because people cannot be trusted to behave appropriately with automation tools.
"Avoids bot detection and CAPTCHAs" - Sure asshole, but understand that's only in place because of people like you. If you truly need access to something, ask for an API, may you need to pay for it, maybe you don't. May you get it, maybe the site owner tells you to go pound sand and you should take that as you're behaviour and/or use case is not wanted.
Actually, the CAPTCHAs are in place mostly because of assholes like you abusing other assholes like you[0].
Most of the automated misbehavior is businesses doing it to other businesses - in many cases, it's direct competition, or a third party the competition outsources it to. Hell, your business is probably doing it to them too (ask the marketing agency you're outsourcing to).
> If you truly need access to something, ask for an API, may you need to pay for it, maybe you don't.
Like you'd give it to me when you know I want it to skip your ads, or plug it to some automation or a streamlined UI, so I don't have to waste minutes of my life navigating your bloated, dog-slow SPA? But no, can't have users be invisible in analytics and operate outside your carefully designed sales funnel.
> May you get it, maybe the site owner tells you to go pound sand and you should take that as you're behaviour and/or use case is not wanted.
Like they have a final say in this.
This is an evergreen discussion, and well-trodden ground. There is a reason the browser is also called "user agent"; there is a well-established separation between user's and server's zone of controls, so as a site owner, stop poking your nose where it doesn't belong.
--
[0] - Not "you" 'mrweasel personally, but "you" the imaginary speaker of your second paragraph.
It seems that we have very different types of businesses in mind. I really didn't consider tracking users and displaying ads, but I also don't think this is where these types of tools would be used. Well, they might, but that's as part of some content farm, undesirable bots and downright scams, so nothing of value is really lost if this didn't exist.
If you have a sales funnel, as in you take orders and ship something to a customer, consumer or business, I almost guarantee you that you can request an API, if the company you want to purchase from is large enough. They'll probably give you the API access for free, or as part of a signup fee and give you access to discounts. Sometimes that API might be an email, or a monthly Excel dump, but it's an API.
When we're talking site that purely survive on tracking users and reselling their data, then yes, they aren't going to give you API access. Some sites, like Reddit does offer it I think, but the price is going to be insane, reflecting their unwillingness to interact with users in this way.
> It seems that we have very different types of businesses in mind. I really didn't consider tracking users and displaying ads, but I also don't think this is where these types of tools would be used.
I wasn't thinking primarily about tracking and ads here either, when it comes to B2B automation. What I meant was e.g. shops automatically scrapping competing stores on a continued basis, to adjust their own prices - a modern version of the old "send your employees incognito to the nearby stores and have them secretly note down prices". Then you also have comparison-shopping (pricing aggregators) sites that are after the same data, too.
And then of course there's automated reviews (reading and writing), trying to improve your standing and/or sabotage competition. There's all kinds of more or less legit business intelligence happening, etc. Then there's wholesale copying of sites (or just their data) for SEO content farms, and... I could go on.
Point being, it's not the people who want to streamline their own work, make access more convenient for themselves, etc. that are the badly-behaving actors and reasons for anti-bot defenses.
> If you have a sales funnel, as in you take orders and ship something to a customer, consumer or business, I almost guarantee you that you can request an API, if the company you want to purchase from is large enough. They'll probably give you the API access for free, or as part of a signup fee and give you access to discounts. Sometimes that API might be an email, or a monthly Excel dump, but it's an API.
The problem from a POV of a regular users like me is, I'm not in this for business directly; the services I use are either too small to bother providing me special APIs, or I am too small for them to care. All I need is to streamline my access patterns to services I already use, perhaps consolidate it with other services (that's what MCP is doing, with LLM being the glue), but otherwise not doing anything disruptive to their operations. And I'm denied that, because... Bots Bad, AI Bad, Also Pay Us For Privilege?
> When we're talking site that purely survive on tracking users and reselling their data, then yes, they aren't going to give you API access. Some sites, like Reddit does offer it I think, but the price is going to be insane, reflecting their unwillingness to interact with users in this way.
Reddit is an interesting case because the changes to their API and 3rd-party client policies happened recently, and clearly in response to the rise of LLMs. A lot of companies suddenly realized the vast troves of user-generated content they host are valuable beyond just building marketing profiles, and now they try to lock it all up in order to extort rent for it.
It's just a way to provide a "library of methods" / API that the LLM models can "call", so basically giving them method names, their parameters, the type of the output, and what they are for,
and then the LLM model will ask the MCP server to call the functions, check the result, call the next function if needed, etc
Right now if you go to ChatGPT you can't really tell it "open Google maps with my account, search for bike shops near NYC, and grab their phone numbers", because all he can do is reply in text or make images
with a "browser MCP" it is now possible: ChatGPT has a way to tell your browser "open Google maps", "show me a screenshot", "click at that position", etc
Isn't the idea of AI agent talking to each by telling LLM model to reply say in, JSON and with some parameter value map to, say function in Python code? That in retrospect, given context {prompt} to LLM will be able to call said function code?
> with a "browser MCP" it is now possible: ChatGPT has a way to tell your browser "open Google maps", "show me a screenshot", "click at that position", etc
It seems strange to me to focus on this sort of standard well in advance of models being reliable enough to, ya know, actually be able perform these operations on behalf of the user with any sort of strong reliability that you would need for widespread adoption to be successful.
Cryptocurrency "if you build it they'll come" vibes.
I think MCPs compensate for the unreliability issue by providing a minimal and well defined interface to a controlled set of actions. That way, the llm doesn't have to be as reliable thinking what it needs to do and in acting, just in choosing what to do from a short list.
Not that im aware of, but that actually would be an interesting project.
I was referring more broadly to ClaudePlaysPokemon, a twitch stream where claude is given tool calling into a Gameboy Color emulator in order to try to play Pokemon. It has slowly made progress and i recommend looking at the stream to see just how flawed LLM's are currently for even the shortest of timelines w.r.t. planning.
I compared the two because the tool calling API here is a similar enough to an MCP configuration with the same hooks/tools (happy to be corrected on that though)
Maybe because the LLM improvements haven't been that good in the last year, they needed some new thing to hype it/market it.
EDIT: Don't get me wrong, the benchmark scores are indeed higher, but in my personal experience, LLMs make as many mistakes as they did before, still too unreliable to use for cases where you actually need a factually correct answer.
That's not fault of MCP though, that's the fault of vendors peddling their MCPs while clinging to the SaaS model.
Yes, MCP is a way to streamline giving LLMs ability to run arbitrary code on your machine, however indirectly. It's meant to be used on "your side of the airlock", where you trust the things that run. Obviously it's too powerful for it to be used with third-party tools you neither trust nor control; it's not that different than downloading random binaries from the Internet.
I suppose it's good to spell out the risks, but it doesn't make sense blaming MCP itself, because those risks are fundamental aspects of the features it provides.
It's not blame, but it's a striking reality that needs to be kept at the forefront.
It introduces a substantial set of novel failure modes, like cross-tool shadowing, which aren't obvious to most folks. Making use of any externally developed tooling — even open source tools on internal architecture — requires more careful consideration and analysis than most would expect. Despite the warnings, there will certainly be major breaches on these lines.
Most of these are not a real concern with remote servers with Oauth. If you install the PayPal MCP MCP server from im-deffo-not-hacking-you.com than https://mcp.paypal.com/sse its the same sec model as anything else online...
At the risk of it sounding like i support theft; the automobile, you know, enabled the likes of Bonnie and Clyde and that whole era of lawlessness. Until the fbi and crossing county lines became a thing.
So im not sure id give up the sum total progress of the automobile just because the first decade was a bad one
MCP is a standard to plug useful tools into AI models so they can use them. The concept looks confusingly reversed and non-obvious to a normal person, although devs don't see this because it looks like their tooling.
I know what you mean, I think MCP is being widely adopted but it's not grassroots.. its a quick entry to this market by an established AI company trying to dominate the mind/market share of developers before consensus can be reached developers.
When I go to a shopping website I want to be able to tell my browser "hey please go through all the sideboards on this list and filter out for the ones that are larger than 155cm and smaller than 100cm, prioritise the ones with dark wood and space for vinyl records which are 31.43cm tall" for example.
Is there any browser that can do this yet as it seems extremely useful to be able to extract details from the page!
Hey, we’re working on MatterRank which is pretty similar to this but currently works on web search. (e.g. I want to prioritize results that talk about X and have Y bias and I want to deprioritize those that are trying to sell me something). Feel free to try it out at https://matterrank.ai
Would also be interested in hearing more about what you’re envisioning for your use case. Are you thinking a browser extension that acts on sites you’re already on, or some sort of shopping aggregator that lets you do this, or something else entirely?
Not OP but I definitely sympathise with them. I don't know how practical it is to implement or how profitable it would be, but the problem I often have is this:
* I have something I want to buy and have specific needs for it (height, color, shape, other properties)
* I know that there's a good chance the website I'm on sells a product that meets those needs (or possibly several such that I'd want to choose from)
* my criteria are more specific than the filters available on the site e.g. I want a specific length down to a few cm because I want the biggest thing that will fit in a fixed space
* crucially for an AI use case: the information exists on the individual product pages. They all list dimensions and specifications. I just don't want to have to go through them all.
Example: find me all of the desks on IKEA that come in light coloured wood, are 55 inches wide, and rank them from deepest to shallowest. Oh, and make sure they're in stock at my nearest IKEA, or are delivering within the next week.
Well done, just tested on Claude Desktop and it worked smoothly and a lot less clunky than playwright. This is the right direction to go in.
I don't know if you've done it already, but it would be great to pause automation when you detect a captcha on the page and then notify the user that the automation needs attention. Playwright keeps trying to plough through captchas.
Crazy, in looking up some info on the web and creating a Spreadsheet on Google Sheets to insert the results, it worked almost perfectly the first time and completely failed subsequently on 8-10 different tries.
Is there an issue with the lag between what is happening in the browser and the MCP app (in my case Claude Desktop)?
I have a feeling the first time I tried it, I was fast enough clicking the "Allow for this chat" permissions, whereas by the time I clicked the permission on subsequent chats, the LLM just reports "It seems we had an issue with the click. Let me try again with a different reference.".
Actions which worked flawlessly the first time (rename a Google spreadsheet by clicking on the title and inputting the name) fail 100% of subsequent attempts.
Same with identifying cells A1, B1, etc. and inserting into the rows.
Almost perfect on 1st try, not reproducible in 100% of attempts afterwards.
Kudos to how smooth this experience is though, very nice setup & execution!
EDIT 2:
The lag & speed to click the allow action make it seemingly unusable in Claude Desktop. :(
Such a rich UI like google sheets seems like a bad use case for such a general "browser automation" MCP server. Would be cool to see an MCP server like this, but with specific tools that let the LLM read and write to google sheets cells. I'm sure it would knock these tasks out of the park if it had a more specific abstraction instead of generally interacting with a webpage
I mean publish it on the npm registry (https://www.npmjs.com/signup). That way, it would be easy to install, just by adding some lines to claude_desktop_config.json:
What you're experiencing is commonly referred to as "luck". It's the same reason people consistently think newer versions of ChatGPT are nerfed in some way. In reality, people just got lucky originally and have unrealistic expectations based on this originally positive outcome.
There's no bug or glitch happening. It's just statistically unlikely to perform the action you wanted and you landed a good dice roll on your first turn.
haha yeh as someone who has built automation for years i can agree with this. You cant just click on something in a script, you need to reliably click on something. As a user, its very easy for you to make adjustments like clicking twice on a link if it doesnt load in time. Thats pretty much what your automation suite needs to end up with. A series of a functions to emulate user actions. You then combine that together with your scripts to create reliable scripts that can run in different conditions. LLMs wont do that for you, u need to instruct them specifically.
Stuff like this makes me giddy for manual tasks like reimbursement requests. Its such a chore (and it doesnt help our process isnt great).
Every month, go to service providers, log in, find and download statement, create google doc with details filled in, download it, write new email and upload all the files. Maybe double chek the attachments are right but that requires downloading them again instead of being able to view in email).
Automating this is already possible (and a real expense tracking app can eliminate about half of this work) but I think AI tools have the potential to elminate a lot of the nittier-grittier specification of it. This is especially important because these sorts of workflows are often subject to little changes.
Did something similar but controls a hardware synth, allowing me to do sound design without touching the physical knobs: https://github.com/zerubeus/elektron-mcp
Imagine it controlling plugins remotely, have an LLM do mastering and sound shaping with existing tools. The complex overly-graphical UIs of VSTs might be a barrier to performance there, but you could hook into those labeled midi mapping interfaces to control the knobs and levels.
I just view it as a relative minor convenience, but it's not some game-changer IMO.
The tool use / function calling thing far predates Anthropic releasing the MCP specification and it really wasn't that onerous to do before either. You could provide a json schema spec and tell the model to generate compliant json to pass to the API in question. MCP doesn't inherently solve any of the problems that come up in that sort of workflow, but it does provide an idiomatic approach for it (so there's a non-zero value there, but not much).
Yea it certainly does benefit Claude Desktop to some degree, but most MCP servers are a few hundred SLOC and the protocol schema itself is only ~400 SLOC. If that was the only major obstacle standing in the way of adoption, I'd be very surprised.
Coupled with the fact that any LLM trained for tool use can utilize the protocol, it doesn't feel like much of a moat that uniquely positions Claude Desktop in a meaningful way.
MCP is useful because anthropic has a disproportionate share of API traffic relative to its valuation and a tiny share of first-party client traffic. The best way around this is to shift as much traffic to API as possible.
I would probably call it shipping containers for LLM tool integrations.
Containers are not a big deal when viewed in isolation. But when its common size/standard for all kinds of ships, cranes and trucks, it is a big deal then.
In that sense its more about gathering community around one way to do things.
In theory there are REST APIs and OpenAPI standard, but those were not made for LLMs but code.
So you usually need some kind of friendly wrapper(like for candy) on top of REST API.
It really starts to feel like a a big deal when you work in integrating LLMs with tools.
2025-04-07T18:43:26.537Z [browsermcp] [info] Initializing server...
2025-04-07T18:43:26.603Z [browsermcp] [info] Server started and connected successfully
2025-04-07T18:43:26.610Z [browsermcp] [info] Message from client: {"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2024-11-05","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"claude-ai","version":"0.1.0"}},"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":0}
node:internal/errors:983
const err = new Error(message);
^
Error: Command failed: FOR /F "tokens=5" %a in ('netstat -ano ^| findstr :9009') do taskkill /F /PID %a
at genericNodeError (node:internal/errors:983:15)
at wrappedFn (node:internal/errors:537:14)
at checkExecSyncError (node:child_process:882:11)
at execSync (node:child_process:954:15)
I just published a new version of the @browsermcp/mcp library (version 0.1.1) that handles the error better until I can investigate further so it should hopefully work now if you're using @browsermcp/mcp@latest.
It's working now with the 0.1.0 for me. But I will let you know if I experience any issues once I get updated to 0.1.1.
Thanks, great job! I like it overall, but I noticed it has some issues entering text in forms, even on google.com. It's able to find a workaround and insert the searched text in the URL, but it would be nice if the entry into forms worked well for UI testing.
I don't see how an MCP can be useful for browsing the net and doing things like shopping as has been suggested. Large companies such as CloudFlare have spent millions on, and made a business from, bot detection and blocking.
Do we suppose they will just create a backdoor to allow _some_ bots in? If they do that how long will it be before other bots impersonate them? It seems like a bit of a fad from my small mind.
Suppose it does become a thing, what then? We end up with an internet which is heavily optimised for bots (arguably it already is to an extent) and unusable for humans?
> Suppose it does become a thing, what then? We end up with an internet which is heavily optimised for bots (arguably it already is to an extent) and unusable for humans?
As opposed to the Web we now have, which is heavily optimized for... wasting human life.
What you're asking for, what "large companies such as CloudFlare have spent millions on", is verifying that on the other end of the connection is a web browser, and behind that web browser there is a human being that's being made to needlessly suffer and waste their limited lifespans, as they tediously work their way through the UI maze like a good little lab rat, watching ads at every turn of the corridor, while being constantly surveilled.
Or do you believe there is some other reason why you should care about whether you're interacting with a "human" (really: an user agent called "web browser") vs. "not human" (really: any other user agent)?
The relationship between the commercial web and its users is antagonistic - businesses make money through friction, by making it more difficult for users to accomplish their goals. That's why we never got the era of APIs and web automation for users. That's why we're dealing with tons of bespoke shitty SPAs instead of consistent interfaces - because no store wants to make it easy for you to comparison-shop, or skip their upsells, or efficiently search through the stock; no news service wants you to skip ads or make focused searches, etc.
As users, we've lost the battle for APIs and continue to be forced to use the "manual web" (with active cooperation of the browser vendors, too). MCP feels promising because we're in a moment in time, however brief, where LLMs can navigate the "manual web" for us, shielding us from all the malicious bullshit (ads, marketing copy, funneling, call to actions, confusing design, dark patterns, less dark patterns, the fact that your store is a bloated SPA instead of an endpoint for a generic database querying frontend, and so on) while remaining mostly impervious to it. This will not last long - the vendors de-facto ruling the web have every reason to shut it down (or turn it around and use LLMs against us). But for now, it works.
Adversarial interoperability is the name of the game. LLMs, especially combined with tool use (and right tools), make it much easier and much more accessible than ever before. For however brief a moment.
Sorry it wasn't entirely clear that I was by no means saying the web in its current form is anything close to what it could/should be. My main point was that, by making backdoors for MCPs there will be a new possible entry point for bad actors by exploiting said backdoor.
As for the optimisation to _waste human life_ I do agree but the reality is that the sites which waste the majority of human life/time are the ones which would not be automated by the MCP and would, ultimately, see more 'real' usage by virtue of the fact that your average human will have more time to mindlessly scroll their favourite echo-chamber.
Then we have the whole other debate of whether we really believe that the VC funders whom are largely responsible for the current state of the web will continue pumping money into something which would hurt their bottom line from another angle?
Fair enough. Thanks for clarifying. I agree with what you're saying in this comment.
On the topic of:
> whether we really believe that the VC funders whom are largely responsible for the current state of the web will continue pumping money into something which would hurt their bottom line from another angle?
No, I don't believe that at all - which is why I keep saying the current situation is an anomaly, a brief moment in time. LLMs deployed in form of general-purpose chatbots/agents are giving too much power to the people, which is already becoming disruptive to many businesses, so that power will be gradually taken away. Expect less general-purpose AI agents, and more "AI powered features" that shackle LLMs behind some limited UI, to ensure you can only get as much benefit from AI as it fits the vendors' business strategies.
Most thing that do this kind of fingerprinting bot detection aren't looking for a browser that's pretending to be a human, they're looking for other programs that are pretending to be a browser.
> Do we suppose they will just create a backdoor to allow _some_ bots in?
That, and maybe they will as CF seem quite big on MCP.[0] Or people just bypass the bot detection. It's already not terribly difficult to do; people in the sneaker bot and ticket scalping communities have long had bypasses for all the major companies.
I mean, we can all imagine bad use-cases of bots, but there's also the pros: the internet wastes loads of human time. I still remember needing to browse marketplaces real estate listings with terrible search and notification functionality to find a flat... shudders. Unbelievable amount of hours wasted.
If fewer people are able to build bots that can index a larger number of sites and give better searching capabilities, for instance, where sites are unable to provide this, I'm personally all for it. For many sites, it's that they lack the in-house development expertise and probably they wouldn't even mind.
Ideally, shouldn't this be the native experience of most "sites" on the internet? We've built an entire user experience around serving users rich, two dimensional visual content that is not machine-readable and are now building a natural language command line layer on top of it. Why not get rid of the middleware and present users a direct natural language interface to the application layer?
The Puppeteer MCP server doesn't work well because it requires CSS selectors to interact with elements. It makes up CSS selectors rather than reading the page and generating working selectors.
The Playwright MCP server is great! Currently Browser MCP is largely an adaptation of the Playwright MCP server to use with your actual browser rather than creating a new one each time. This allows you to reuse your existing Chrome profile so that you don't need to log in to each service all over again and avoids bot detection which often triggers when using the fresh browser instances created by Playwright.
I also plan to add other useful tools (e.g. Browser MCP currently supports a tool to get the console logs which is useful for automated debugging) which will likely diverge from the Playwright MCP server features.
by the way, you can indeed access your personal context with Playwright. just `launchPersistentContext()` and set the userDataDir to that of your existing Chrome install:
Browser MCP uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to automate the browser so it currently only works for Chromium-based browsers.
Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't expose WebDriver BiDi (the standardized version of CDP) to browser extensions AFAIK (someone please correct me if I'm mistaken!), so I don't think I can support it even if I tried.
In the Task Automation demo, how does it know all of the attributes of the motorcycle he is trying to sell? Is it relying on the underlying LLM's embedded knowledge? But then how would it know the price and mileage? Is there some underlying document not referenced in the demo? Because that information is not in the prompt.
I just run into a bunch of errors on my Windows machine + Chrome when connected over remote-ssh. Extension installed, tab enabled, npx updated/installed, etc.
2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [info] rmcp: Starting new stdio process with command: npx @browsermcp/mcp@latest
2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [error] rmcp: No server info found
---
EDIT: Ended up fixing it by patching index.js. killProcessOnPort() was the problem. Can hit me up if you have questions, I cannot figure out how to put readable code in HN after all these years with the fake markdown syntax they use.
> I cannot figure out how to put readable code in HN after all these years with the fake markdown syntax they use.
Not that HN supports much in the way of markup, but code blocks are actually the same as Markdown: indent (by 2 spaces or more, in HN's syntax; Markdown calls for 4 or more, so they're compatible).
Thanks for the report and the update! I'd love to hear about what you changed — how can I get in touch? I didn't see anything in your HN profile. Feel free to email me at admin@browsermcp.io
I wonder if it's possible to add such plugins to election apps (e.g.: Slack).
It would be such a nice experience if I could just connect my AI of choice to a local app.
Setting this up for claude desktop and cursor was alright.
Works well out of the box with little setup, and I like that it attached to my active browser tab. Keep up the good work.
I literally started working on the same exact idea last night haha. Great work OP. I'm curious, how are you feeding the web data to the LLM? Are you just passing the entire page contents to it and then having it interact with the page based on CSS selectors/xpath? Also, what are your thoughts on letting it do its own scripting to automate certain tasks?
What I don't like about LLMs is that people keep re-inventing the wheel over and over. For example, we've been able to control browsers using GPT for about 2 years now:
none of these have stuck right. And none of them work well enough that all web dev agencies no longer have to worry about e2e testing. (or do some of them? Maybe the market is simply that inefficient).
I don't see this being a solution for full e2e regression testing. Having to run inference for each command/test seems expensive. I do think there's room for self-healing tests after failure.
If this works well enough couldn't you save the selectors and only use inference running the test for the first time and when the UI has changed. Cheaper than dev?
that would be a good feature. though there are already playback and record tools to do just that. I really only see this for low-code users who want to automate a novel task.
An extension is more user-friendly! I leave Chrome open basically 24/7 and having to create a new Chrome instance via the command line just to use Browser MCP just felt like too high of a barrier.
Exposing Chrome CDP is a terrible idea from a security and privacy perspective. You get the keys to the whole kingdom (and expose them on a standard port with a well documented API). All security features of the web can be bypassed, and then some, as CDP exposes even more capabilities than chrome extensions and without any form of supervision.
In the local context as well. Unlike say the docker socket which is protected by default using unix permissions, the CDP protocol has no authorization, authentication or permission mechanism.
Anything on your machine (such as a rogue browser extension or a malicious npm/pypi package) could scan for this and just get all your cookies - and that's only the beginning of your problems.
CDP can access any origin, any data stored (localStorage, indexedDB ...), any javascript heap, cross iframe and origin boundaries, run almost undetectable code that uses your sessions without you knowing, and the list is very long. CDP was never meant to expose a real browser in an untrusted context.
Not, human tired of creating content to put online and being consumed not by people but by bots or any other form of mechanical consumption that I don't like. As the owner of the content I think I have the right to set that preference, don't you think?
What if you are using domain names for your local environment or a cloud environment like IDX or you want to automate the testing of the UAT environment?
thank you for this. Using my own browser helps me automate tasks on sites I 'd typically get detected using automation. Works like a charm! Hope you continue to work on the repo.
We work on something similar and aim to be the huggingface hub for automations you can run in your browser[0], with built-in support for MCP SSE.
Use the pre-built Trails[1][2] as MCP servers or create and publish your own with a familiar puppeteer-like API, powered by your or your friends browsers.
From Claude I have connected to these MCP servers OK : @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem, @executeautomation/playwright-mcp-server.
I have connected to OP's extension (browsermcp.io) from vsCode (and clicked 1 tab button OK), but not from Claude desktop so far (I get Cannot find module 'node:path'; which is require-d in npm/lib/cli.js; tried node 18,20,22; some suggestions here : https://medium.com/@aleksej.gudkov/error-cannot-find-module-... ).
> that's a great use case! the aria snapshot that browser mcp generates is enough to write tests for playwright using its role-based locators, but i may add a get_page_html tool in the same way that they're considering: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/issues/103
Of course, you're sending data to the AI model, but the "private" aspect is contrasting automating using a local browser vs. automating using a remote browser.
When you automate using a remote browser, another service (not the AI model) gets all of the browsing activity and any information you send (e.g. usernames and passwords) that's required for the automation.
With Browser MCP, since you're automating locally, your sensitive data and browser activity (apart from the results of MCP tool calls that's sent to the AI model) stay on your device.
I think we need to be very careful & intentional about the language we use with these kinds of tools, especially now that the MCP floodgates have been opened. You aren't just exposing the users browsing data to which ever model they are using, you are also exposing it any tools they may be allowing as well.
A lot of non technical people are using these tools to "vibe" their way to productivity. I would explicitly tell them that potentially "all" of their browsing data is going to be exposed to their LLM client and they need to use this at their own risk.
Cursor is currently stuck using an outdated snapshot of the VSCode Marketplace, meaning several extensions within Cursor remain affected by high-severity CVEs that have already been patched upstream in VSCode. As a result, Cursor users unknowingly remain vulnerable to known security issues.
This issue has been acknowledged but remains unresolved: https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/1602#issuecomment...
Given Cursor's rising popularity, users should be aware of this gap in security updates. Until the Cursor team resolves the marketplace sync issue, caution is advised when using certain extensions.
I am surprised that the VSCode team hasn't gone after them for mirroring the marketplace, as the Visual Studio team made it very clear that they don't want anybody to do that -- it is their marketplace.
[!warning!]
1) this projects' chrome extension sends detailed telemetry to posthog and amplitude:
- https://storage.googleapis.com/cobrowser-images/telemetry.pn...
- https://storage.googleapis.com/cobrowser-images/pings.png
2) this project includes source for the local mcp server, but not for its chrome extension, which is likely bundling https://github.com/ruifigueira/playwright-crx without attribution
super suss
Hey, creator of Browser MCP here.
1. Yes, the extension uses an anonymous device ID and sends an analytics event when a tool call is used. You can inspect the network traffic to verify that zero personalized or identifying information is sent.
I collect anonymized usage data to get an idea of how often people are using the extension in the same way that websites count visitors. I split my time between many projects and having a sense of how many active users there are is helpful for deciding which ones to focus on.
2. The extension is completely written by me, and I wrote in this GitHub issue why the repo currently only contains the MCP server (in short, I use a monorepo that contains code used by all my extensions and extracting this extension and maintaining multiple monorepos while keeping them in sync would require quite a bit of work): https://github.com/BrowserMCP/mcp/issues/1#issuecomment-2784...
I understand that you're frustrated with the way I've built this project, but there's really nothing nefarious going on here. Cheers!
Hey, as a maker, I get it. You spent time building something, and you want to understand how it gets used. If you're not collecting personal info, there is nothing wrong with this.
Knee-jerk reactions aren't helpful. Yes, too much tracking is not good, but some tracking is definitely important to improving a product over time and focusing your efforts.
When people see “I collect” they won’t even bother reading further.
This is showstopper.
Noble reasons won’t matter.
Spyware perception.
This seems to be the opposite of what happens in reality.
"detailed" is an anonymized deviceId and a counter of tool calls? Heaven forbid an app want to get some basic insights into how people use it.
Correct. Telemetry should _always_ be opt-in and explicitly an easy choice to not engage.
Any other mode of operation is morally bankrupt.
Really? The hyperbole does not help anyone here.
I don't sign a term sheet when I order at McDonalds but you can be damn sure they count how many big macs I order. Does that make them morally bankrupt? Or is it just a normal business operation that is actually totally reasonable?
> Does that make them morally bankrupt?
Yes, it does.
This automatic sense of entitlement to surveil users is the absolute embodiment of the banality of evil.
It's 2025 - we want informed consent and voluntary participation with the default assumption that no, we do not want you watching over our shoulders, and no, you are not entitled to covertly harvest all the data you want and monetize that without notifying users or asking permissions. The whole ToS gotcha game is bullshit, and it's way past time for this behavior to stop.
Ignorance and inertia bolstering the status quo doesn't make it any less wrong to pile more bullshit like this onto the existing massive pile of bullshit we put up with. It's still bullshit.
You're making a huge jump from "gathering anonymous counters to understand how many people use the thing" to "harvest all the data you want and monetize it".
If they were tracking my identity across sites and actually selling it to the highest bidder that's one thing that we'll definitely agree on. This is so so far from that.
You're welcome to build and use your own MCP browser automation if you're so hostile to the developer that built something cool and free for you to use.
The supply chain vulnerability in any extension is obvious. The problems with telemetry - any at all - are wide ranging and it's crazy to me that people don't see this.
Any covert, involuntary, automatic surveillance of a person for any reason whatsoever should have a court order and legal authority behind it - it's gross and exposes the target to vulnerabilities they're not cognizant of.
For telemetry tracking user behavior to be useful at all, it's got to be associated with a user. The idea of telemetry anonymization is marketing speak for "we obfuscated it, we know deanonymization is trivial, but people are stupid, especially regulators."
Any anonymization done is sufficiently obfuscated such that corporate asses get covered in the case of any regulatory investigation. There's no legitimate, mathematically valid anonymization of user data that you could do without destroying the information that you're trying to get in the first place through these tools. This means that any aggregation of user data useful to a malicious actor will inevitably be compromised - the second Posthog or Amplitude become a desirable target, they'll get pwned and breached, and much handwringing will be done, and there will be no recourse or recompense for damages done.
The only strategy to prevent the dissemination of surveillance data is not to collect it in the first place. It should be illegal to collect the data without voluntary, user initiated participation, and any information collected should be ephemeral with regular inspection to ensure compliance. Any violation of user privacy should result in crippling fines, something like 5% of the value of the company per user per day of violation - if you can't responsibly manage the data, you shouldn't be collecting it.
This means all the automatic continuous development a/b testing intrusive corner cutting corporate bullshit would have to stop. Continually leaking surveillance data to malicious actors year over year with no repercussions has thoroughly demonstrated that people cannot be trusted with safekeeping data.
I will build and use my own automation if I need to, based on products that don't covertly, involuntarily, ignorantly surveil their users, without even being aware of potential for harm, and I'll continue to point it out when it shows up in random projects and products, because it's wrong and it should stop.
We should stop embracing the things that enshittify the world, and stop sacrificing things like "other people's privacy" for convenience or profit.
The only chrome extensions you should install are ones you can build yourself from source.
... And have reviewed and understand completely
So ... pretty much none
Keep in mind, extensions can update themselves at any time, including when they're bought out by someone else. In fact, I bet that's a huge draw... imagine buying an extension that "can read and modify data on all your websites" and then pushing an update that, oh I dunno, exfiltrates everyone's passwords from their gmail. How would most people even catch that?
DO NOT have any extensions running by default except "on click".
There should be at least some kind of static checker of extensions for their calls to fetch or other network APIs. The Web is just too permissive with updating code, you've got eval and much more. It would be great if browsers had only a narrow bottleneck through which code could be updated, and would ask the user first.
(That wouldn't really solve everything since there can be sleeper code that is "switched on" with certain data coming over the wire, but better than what we have now.)
It would be interesting if you could easily install browser extensions via a source repository URL (e.g. GitHub, or any git URL), then at least there would be more transparency about who/what you are trusting by installing it. Blindly trusting a mostly anonymous chrome store "install" button seems insane, since they don't do any significant policing. Wasn't the promise of safety one of the primary reasons Google started the chrome store?
Like user.script/grease monkey. It use to be that you could publish a reasonably large script and someone would review it. Even better was to start out simple then gradually update it so that existing users can continue reviewing by looking at the changes.
I think the permission system should be much more complicated so that the user gets a prompt that explains what is needed and why.
Furthermore there should be [paid] independent reviewers to sign off on extensions. This adds a lot of credibility, specially to a first time publication without users. That would also give app stores someone to talk to before deleting something. Nefarious actors working for app stores can have their credibility questioned.
> So ... pretty much none
You’d be surprised. It describes all the extensions I use.
So the website claims:
"Avoids bot detection and CAPTCHAs by using your real browser fingerprint."
Yeah, not really.
I've used a similar system a few weeks back (one I wrote myself), having AI control my browser using my logged in session, and I started to get Captcha's during my human sessions in the browser and eventually I got blocked from a bunch of websites. Now that I've stopped using my browser session in that way, the blocks eventually went away, but be warned, you'll lose access yourself to websites doing this, it isn't a silver bullet.
The caveat with these things is usually "when used with high quality proxies".
Also I assume this extension is pretty obvious so it wont take long for CF bot detection to see it the same as playwrite or whatever else.
The extension enable debugging in your browser (a banner appears telling you about automation). It's possible to detect that in JavaScript.
Hence why projects like this exist: https://github.com/Kaliiiiiiiiii-Vinyzu/patchright. They hide the debugging part from JavaScript.
It might depend on the speed with which you click on the elements on the website.
it does, CF bans my own honest to God clicks if I do them too fast.
About five years ago, maybe more, Google started sending me captchas if I ran too many repetitive searches. I could be wrong, but it feel like most large platforms have fairly sophisticated anti-bot/scraping stuff in place.
Google does the same to me: Don't they know, I keep modifying my searches because their results sucked so bad I had to try 30 times to find the piece of information I needed?
GitHub regularly blocks me for some reason. They tell me to slow down and I’m blocked for hours. I don’t get it.
Remember when github disabled searches for users who aren‘t logged in? Well, they just set the threshold for searches to 0 these days so they have de-facto disabled them again, this time avoiding the shitstorm.
Make sure you are logged in. It was blocking me after just a couple searches if not logged in.
Yandex does the same.
I use Vimium (Chrome extension for using keyboard control of the browser) and this happens to me as well since the behavior looks "unnatural".
Must suck for people with assistive software. I get blocked on CF for now damn reason.
Yeah, I do wonder if there are any ADA implications with that?
I really really hope there are. Not just because of people who need these provisions, but also for everyone else, as accessibility is the last line of defense for preserving end-user interoperability.
Screen readers need to see a de-bullshittified, machine-readable version of the site + this is required by law sometimes, and generally considered a nice thing to enable -> the site becomes not just screen-reader friendly, but end user automation-friendly in general.
(I don't know how long this will hold, though. LLMs are already capable of becoming a screen reader without any special provisions - they can make sense of the UI the same way a sighted person can. I wouldn't trust them much now, but they'll only get better.)
I wish people would stop using CF. It’s just making the internet worse.
How so?
Same here. And I am also using vimium.
SSLy the speed clicker
What do you think they might be looking for that could be detected pretty quickly? I'm wondering if it is something like they can track mouse movement and calculate when a mouse is moving too cleanly, so adding some more human like noise to the mouse movement can better bypass the system. Others have mentioned doing too many actions too fast, but what about potential timing between actions. Even if every click isn't that fast, if they have a very consistent delay that would be another non-human sign.
Modern captchas use a number of tools including many of the approaches you mentioned. This why you might sometimes see a CloudFlare "I am not a robot" checkbox that checks itself and moves along before you have much time to even react. It's looking at a number of signals to determine that you're probably human before you've even checked the box.
When I am using keyboard navigation, shortcuts and autofills, I seem to get mistaken for a bot a lot. These Captchas are really bad at detecting bots and really good at falsely labelling humans as bots.
With AI feeding / scraping traffic to sites growing ridiculously fast, I think captchas & their equivalent are only going to be on the rise, and given the rise in so many people selling residential proxies I see, I don't doubt that measures and counter-measures on both sides are getting more and more sophisticated.
> These Captchas are really bad at detecting bots and really good at falsely labelling humans as bots.
As a human it feels that way to you. I suspect their false-positive rate is very low.
Of course, you may well be right that you get pinged more because of your style of browsing, which sux.
Given the volume of bots they tend to be remarkably good at detecting bots
source: I work in a team that uses this kind of bot detection and yes, it works. And yes we do our best to keep false positives down
They're detecting patterns predominantly bots use. The fact that some humans also use them doesn't change that.
Back when I was playing Call of Duty 4, I got routinely accused of cheating because some people didn't think it was possible to click the mouse button as fast as I did.
To them it looked like I had some auto-trigger bot or Xbox controller.
I did in fact just have a good mouse and a quick finger.
What's different is the badness of the outcome: if children mislabel you as a cheater in CoD, you may get kicked from the server.
If CloudFlare mislabels you as a bot, however, you may be unable to access medical services, or your bank account, or unable to check in for a flight, stuff like that. Actual important things.
So yes, I think it's not unreasonable to expect more from CF. The fact that some humans are routinely mischaracterized as bots should be a blocker level issue.
Does it suck? Yes, absolutely. Should CF continuously work to reduce false positives? Yes, absolutely.
I've never failed the CF bot test so don't know how that feels. Though I have managed to get to level 8 or 9 on Google's ReCaptcha in recent times, and actually given up a couple of times.
Though my point was just it's gonna boil down to a duck test, so if you walk like a duck and quack like a duck, CF might just think you're a duck.
Well you have to have false positives or negatives. Maybe they prefer positives
> I'm wondering if it is something like they can track mouse movement
Yes, this is a big signal they use.
> adding some more human like noise to the mouse
Yes, this is a standard avoidance strategy. Easier said than done. For every new noise generation method, they work on detection. They also detect more global usage patterns and other signals, so you'd need to immitate the entire workflow of being human. At least within the noise of their current models.
Have a lot of small things count towards the result. Users behave quite linearly, extra points if they act differently all of a sudden.
There's also the whole issue of captchas being in place because people cannot be trusted to behave appropriately with automation tools.
"Avoids bot detection and CAPTCHAs" - Sure asshole, but understand that's only in place because of people like you. If you truly need access to something, ask for an API, may you need to pay for it, maybe you don't. May you get it, maybe the site owner tells you to go pound sand and you should take that as you're behaviour and/or use case is not wanted.
Actually, the CAPTCHAs are in place mostly because of assholes like you abusing other assholes like you[0].
Most of the automated misbehavior is businesses doing it to other businesses - in many cases, it's direct competition, or a third party the competition outsources it to. Hell, your business is probably doing it to them too (ask the marketing agency you're outsourcing to).
> If you truly need access to something, ask for an API, may you need to pay for it, maybe you don't.
Like you'd give it to me when you know I want it to skip your ads, or plug it to some automation or a streamlined UI, so I don't have to waste minutes of my life navigating your bloated, dog-slow SPA? But no, can't have users be invisible in analytics and operate outside your carefully designed sales funnel.
> May you get it, maybe the site owner tells you to go pound sand and you should take that as you're behaviour and/or use case is not wanted.
Like they have a final say in this.
This is an evergreen discussion, and well-trodden ground. There is a reason the browser is also called "user agent"; there is a well-established separation between user's and server's zone of controls, so as a site owner, stop poking your nose where it doesn't belong.
--
[0] - Not "you" 'mrweasel personally, but "you" the imaginary speaker of your second paragraph.
It seems that we have very different types of businesses in mind. I really didn't consider tracking users and displaying ads, but I also don't think this is where these types of tools would be used. Well, they might, but that's as part of some content farm, undesirable bots and downright scams, so nothing of value is really lost if this didn't exist.
If you have a sales funnel, as in you take orders and ship something to a customer, consumer or business, I almost guarantee you that you can request an API, if the company you want to purchase from is large enough. They'll probably give you the API access for free, or as part of a signup fee and give you access to discounts. Sometimes that API might be an email, or a monthly Excel dump, but it's an API.
When we're talking site that purely survive on tracking users and reselling their data, then yes, they aren't going to give you API access. Some sites, like Reddit does offer it I think, but the price is going to be insane, reflecting their unwillingness to interact with users in this way.
> Not "you" 'mrweasel personally
Understood, but thank you :-)
> It seems that we have very different types of businesses in mind. I really didn't consider tracking users and displaying ads, but I also don't think this is where these types of tools would be used.
I wasn't thinking primarily about tracking and ads here either, when it comes to B2B automation. What I meant was e.g. shops automatically scrapping competing stores on a continued basis, to adjust their own prices - a modern version of the old "send your employees incognito to the nearby stores and have them secretly note down prices". Then you also have comparison-shopping (pricing aggregators) sites that are after the same data, too.
And then of course there's automated reviews (reading and writing), trying to improve your standing and/or sabotage competition. There's all kinds of more or less legit business intelligence happening, etc. Then there's wholesale copying of sites (or just their data) for SEO content farms, and... I could go on.
Point being, it's not the people who want to streamline their own work, make access more convenient for themselves, etc. that are the badly-behaving actors and reasons for anti-bot defenses.
> If you have a sales funnel, as in you take orders and ship something to a customer, consumer or business, I almost guarantee you that you can request an API, if the company you want to purchase from is large enough. They'll probably give you the API access for free, or as part of a signup fee and give you access to discounts. Sometimes that API might be an email, or a monthly Excel dump, but it's an API.
The problem from a POV of a regular users like me is, I'm not in this for business directly; the services I use are either too small to bother providing me special APIs, or I am too small for them to care. All I need is to streamline my access patterns to services I already use, perhaps consolidate it with other services (that's what MCP is doing, with LLM being the glue), but otherwise not doing anything disruptive to their operations. And I'm denied that, because... Bots Bad, AI Bad, Also Pay Us For Privilege?
> When we're talking site that purely survive on tracking users and reselling their data, then yes, they aren't going to give you API access. Some sites, like Reddit does offer it I think, but the price is going to be insane, reflecting their unwillingness to interact with users in this way.
Reddit is an interesting case because the changes to their API and 3rd-party client policies happened recently, and clearly in response to the rise of LLMs. A lot of companies suddenly realized the vast troves of user-generated content they host are valuable beyond just building marketing profiles, and now they try to lock it all up in order to extort rent for it.
I feel like I slept for a day and now MCPs are everywhere... I don't know what MCPs are and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.
It's just a way to provide a "library of methods" / API that the LLM models can "call", so basically giving them method names, their parameters, the type of the output, and what they are for,
and then the LLM model will ask the MCP server to call the functions, check the result, call the next function if needed, etc
Right now if you go to ChatGPT you can't really tell it "open Google maps with my account, search for bike shops near NYC, and grab their phone numbers", because all he can do is reply in text or make images
with a "browser MCP" it is now possible: ChatGPT has a way to tell your browser "open Google maps", "show me a screenshot", "click at that position", etc
Isn't the idea of AI agent talking to each by telling LLM model to reply say in, JSON and with some parameter value map to, say function in Python code? That in retrospect, given context {prompt} to LLM will be able to call said function code?
Is this what 'calling' is?
Yes exactly. MCP just formalize this a bit better
> with a "browser MCP" it is now possible: ChatGPT has a way to tell your browser "open Google maps", "show me a screenshot", "click at that position", etc
It seems strange to me to focus on this sort of standard well in advance of models being reliable enough to, ya know, actually be able perform these operations on behalf of the user with any sort of strong reliability that you would need for widespread adoption to be successful.
Cryptocurrency "if you build it they'll come" vibes.
I think MCPs compensate for the unreliability issue by providing a minimal and well defined interface to a controlled set of actions. That way, the llm doesn't have to be as reliable thinking what it needs to do and in acting, just in choosing what to do from a short list.
You can provide an MCP for Pokemon Red, but Claude will still flounder for weeks, making absurd mistakes on a game literally designed for children.
Believe me. It's not there yet.
Is there an MCP for pokemon red?
Not that im aware of, but that actually would be an interesting project.
I was referring more broadly to ClaudePlaysPokemon, a twitch stream where claude is given tool calling into a Gameboy Color emulator in order to try to play Pokemon. It has slowly made progress and i recommend looking at the stream to see just how flawed LLM's are currently for even the shortest of timelines w.r.t. planning.
I compared the two because the tool calling API here is a similar enough to an MCP configuration with the same hooks/tools (happy to be corrected on that though)
The speed that every major LLM foundational model provider has jumped on this bandwagon feels VERY artificial and astro turfy...
Maybe because the LLM improvements haven't been that good in the last year, they needed some new thing to hype it/market it.
EDIT: Don't get me wrong, the benchmark scores are indeed higher, but in my personal experience, LLMs make as many mistakes as they did before, still too unreliable to use for cases where you actually need a factually correct answer.
This is in my opinion exactly what it is. A bunch of people throwing stuff at the wall trying to show "impact."
You actually can, its called Operator and its a complete waste of time, just like 99% of agents/MCPs.
Operator is basically MCP...
And the worst part is that it opens a pandora's box of potential exploits; https://elenacross7.medium.com/%EF%B8%8F-the-s-in-mcp-stands...
That's not fault of MCP though, that's the fault of vendors peddling their MCPs while clinging to the SaaS model.
Yes, MCP is a way to streamline giving LLMs ability to run arbitrary code on your machine, however indirectly. It's meant to be used on "your side of the airlock", where you trust the things that run. Obviously it's too powerful for it to be used with third-party tools you neither trust nor control; it's not that different than downloading random binaries from the Internet.
I suppose it's good to spell out the risks, but it doesn't make sense blaming MCP itself, because those risks are fundamental aspects of the features it provides.
It's not blame, but it's a striking reality that needs to be kept at the forefront.
It introduces a substantial set of novel failure modes, like cross-tool shadowing, which aren't obvious to most folks. Making use of any externally developed tooling — even open source tools on internal architecture — requires more careful consideration and analysis than most would expect. Despite the warnings, there will certainly be major breaches on these lines.
Most of these are not a real concern with remote servers with Oauth. If you install the PayPal MCP MCP server from im-deffo-not-hacking-you.com than https://mcp.paypal.com/sse its the same sec model as anything else online...
The article also reeks of LLM ironically
it still is. if user has 1 bad tool, it's done!
https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-security-notification-tool...
Its the same security model as NPM/left pad yep, but consumers still use electron apps? It's a novel attack method, but its not a novel attack surface
At the risk of it sounding like i support theft; the automobile, you know, enabled the likes of Bonnie and Clyde and that whole era of lawlessness. Until the fbi and crossing county lines became a thing.
So im not sure id give up the sum total progress of the automobile just because the first decade was a bad one
MCP is a standard to plug useful tools into AI models so they can use them. The concept looks confusingly reversed and non-obvious to a normal person, although devs don't see this because it looks like their tooling.
I know what you mean, I think MCP is being widely adopted but it's not grassroots.. its a quick entry to this market by an established AI company trying to dominate the mind/market share of developers before consensus can be reached developers.
It’s RPC specifically for an LLM. But yes it’s the new soup de jour trend sweeping the globe.
When I go to a shopping website I want to be able to tell my browser "hey please go through all the sideboards on this list and filter out for the ones that are larger than 155cm and smaller than 100cm, prioritise the ones with dark wood and space for vinyl records which are 31.43cm tall" for example.
Is there any browser that can do this yet as it seems extremely useful to be able to extract details from the page!
Hey, we’re working on MatterRank which is pretty similar to this but currently works on web search. (e.g. I want to prioritize results that talk about X and have Y bias and I want to deprioritize those that are trying to sell me something). Feel free to try it out at https://matterrank.ai
Would also be interested in hearing more about what you’re envisioning for your use case. Are you thinking a browser extension that acts on sites you’re already on, or some sort of shopping aggregator that lets you do this, or something else entirely?
Not OP but I definitely sympathise with them. I don't know how practical it is to implement or how profitable it would be, but the problem I often have is this: * I have something I want to buy and have specific needs for it (height, color, shape, other properties) * I know that there's a good chance the website I'm on sells a product that meets those needs (or possibly several such that I'd want to choose from) * my criteria are more specific than the filters available on the site e.g. I want a specific length down to a few cm because I want the biggest thing that will fit in a fixed space * crucially for an AI use case: the information exists on the individual product pages. They all list dimensions and specifications. I just don't want to have to go through them all.
Example: find me all of the desks on IKEA that come in light coloured wood, are 55 inches wide, and rank them from deepest to shallowest. Oh, and make sure they're in stock at my nearest IKEA, or are delivering within the next week.
You could do that with browser-use: https://browser-use.com/
When doing interior decoration, I am definitely interested in finding objects that fit very specific prompts.
Well done, just tested on Claude Desktop and it worked smoothly and a lot less clunky than playwright. This is the right direction to go in.
I don't know if you've done it already, but it would be great to pause automation when you detect a captcha on the page and then notify the user that the automation needs attention. Playwright keeps trying to plough through captchas.
Crazy, in looking up some info on the web and creating a Spreadsheet on Google Sheets to insert the results, it worked almost perfectly the first time and completely failed subsequently on 8-10 different tries.
Is there an issue with the lag between what is happening in the browser and the MCP app (in my case Claude Desktop)?
I have a feeling the first time I tried it, I was fast enough clicking the "Allow for this chat" permissions, whereas by the time I clicked the permission on subsequent chats, the LLM just reports "It seems we had an issue with the click. Let me try again with a different reference.".
Actions which worked flawlessly the first time (rename a Google spreadsheet by clicking on the title and inputting the name) fail 100% of subsequent attempts.
Same with identifying cells A1, B1, etc. and inserting into the rows.
Almost perfect on 1st try, not reproducible in 100% of attempts afterwards.
Kudos to how smooth this experience is though, very nice setup & execution!
EDIT 2: The lag & speed to click the allow action make it seemingly unusable in Claude Desktop. :(
I have worked on a google sheets MCP, for data scraping it worked pretty well leveraging Claude's built-in search functionalities.
example: https://x.com/xing101/status/1903391600040083488 set up: https://github.com/xing5/mcp-google-sheets
Such a rich UI like google sheets seems like a bad use case for such a general "browser automation" MCP server. Would be cool to see an MCP server like this, but with specific tools that let the LLM read and write to google sheets cells. I'm sure it would knock these tasks out of the park if it had a more specific abstraction instead of generally interacting with a webpage
Agreed, I'd been working on a Google Sheets specific MCP last week – just got it published here: https://github.com/mkummer225/google-sheets-mcp
This is cool. You should submit this as a 'Show HN'.
Also consider publishing it so people can use it without having to use git.
Publishing it where? It can’t be a github page, it’s too complex; anything else incurs real costs.
I mean publish it on the npm registry (https://www.npmjs.com/signup). That way, it would be easy to install, just by adding some lines to claude_desktop_config.json:
What you're experiencing is commonly referred to as "luck". It's the same reason people consistently think newer versions of ChatGPT are nerfed in some way. In reality, people just got lucky originally and have unrealistic expectations based on this originally positive outcome.
There's no bug or glitch happening. It's just statistically unlikely to perform the action you wanted and you landed a good dice roll on your first turn.
haha yeh as someone who has built automation for years i can agree with this. You cant just click on something in a script, you need to reliably click on something. As a user, its very easy for you to make adjustments like clicking twice on a link if it doesnt load in time. Thats pretty much what your automation suite needs to end up with. A series of a functions to emulate user actions. You then combine that together with your scripts to create reliable scripts that can run in different conditions. LLMs wont do that for you, u need to instruct them specifically.
For me it can't click anywhere on google sheets. I get the following error
--Error: Cannot access a chrome-extension:// URL of different extension
Stuff like this makes me giddy for manual tasks like reimbursement requests. Its such a chore (and it doesnt help our process isnt great).
Every month, go to service providers, log in, find and download statement, create google doc with details filled in, download it, write new email and upload all the files. Maybe double chek the attachments are right but that requires downloading them again instead of being able to view in email).
Automating this is already possible (and a real expense tracking app can eliminate about half of this work) but I think AI tools have the potential to elminate a lot of the nittier-grittier specification of it. This is especially important because these sorts of workflows are often subject to little changes.
This may be obvious to most here, but you need Node.js installed for the MCP server to run. This critical detail is not in the set up instructions.
Added!
https://docs.browsermcp.io/setup-server#node-js
Did something similar but controls a hardware synth, allowing me to do sound design without touching the physical knobs: https://github.com/zerubeus/elektron-mcp
Oh good idea.
Imagine it controlling plugins remotely, have an LLM do mastering and sound shaping with existing tools. The complex overly-graphical UIs of VSTs might be a barrier to performance there, but you could hook into those labeled midi mapping interfaces to control the knobs and levels.
Would be nice if it could use the Accessibility Tree from chrome dev tools to navigate the page instead of relying on screenshots (https://developer.chrome.com/blog/full-accessibility-tree)
In fact you have it backwards. It has no screenshots at the moment, only the accessibility tree
So is MCP the new RPA (Robotics Process Automation)? Like generic yahoo pipes?
I just view it as a relative minor convenience, but it's not some game-changer IMO.
The tool use / function calling thing far predates Anthropic releasing the MCP specification and it really wasn't that onerous to do before either. You could provide a json schema spec and tell the model to generate compliant json to pass to the API in question. MCP doesn't inherently solve any of the problems that come up in that sort of workflow, but it does provide an idiomatic approach for it (so there's a non-zero value there, but not much).
It seems the benefit of MCP is for Anthropic to enlist the community in building integrations for Claude desktop, no?
And if other vendors sign on to support MCP, then it becomes a self reinforcing cycle of adoption.
Yea it certainly does benefit Claude Desktop to some degree, but most MCP servers are a few hundred SLOC and the protocol schema itself is only ~400 SLOC. If that was the only major obstacle standing in the way of adoption, I'd be very surprised.
Coupled with the fact that any LLM trained for tool use can utilize the protocol, it doesn't feel like much of a moat that uniquely positions Claude Desktop in a meaningful way.
> And if other vendors sign on to support MCP, then it becomes a self reinforcing cycle of adoption
This is exactly what's happening now. A good portion of applications, frameworks and actors are starting to support it.
I've been reluctant on adopting MCP in applications until there was enough adoption.
However, depending on your use case it may also be too complex for your use case.
MCP is useful because anthropic has a disproportionate share of API traffic relative to its valuation and a tiny share of first-party client traffic. The best way around this is to shift as much traffic to API as possible.
First party client , meaning browser? User agent or … Electron app, or , any mobile app?
first party client as in a claude subscription will give you access (mostly app + web)
The interesting thing about MCP as a tool use protocol is the traction that it has garnered in terms of clients and servers supporting it.
I would probably call it shipping containers for LLM tool integrations.
Containers are not a big deal when viewed in isolation. But when its common size/standard for all kinds of ships, cranes and trucks, it is a big deal then.
In that sense its more about gathering community around one way to do things.
In theory there are REST APIs and OpenAPI standard, but those were not made for LLMs but code. So you usually need some kind of friendly wrapper(like for candy) on top of REST API.
It really starts to feel like a a big deal when you work in integrating LLMs with tools.
I'm a bit stuck on this, maybe you can explain why an LLM would have any difficulty writing REST API calls? Seems like it should be no problem.
No, since MCP is just an interface layer it is to AI what REST API is to DPA and COM/App DLLs are to RPA.
APA (Agentic Process Automation) is the new RPA, and this is definitely one example of it.
But AI already supported function calling, and you could describe them in various ways. Isn't this just a different way to define function calling?
What I used this for:
"Go to https://news.ycombinator.com/upvoted?id=josefrichter, summarize what topics I am interested in, and then from the homepage pick articles I might be interested in."
Works like a charm.
Doesn't work on Windows:
2025-04-07T18:43:26.537Z [browsermcp] [info] Initializing server... 2025-04-07T18:43:26.603Z [browsermcp] [info] Server started and connected successfully 2025-04-07T18:43:26.610Z [browsermcp] [info] Message from client: {"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2024-11-05","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"claude-ai","version":"0.1.0"}},"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":0} node:internal/errors:983 const err = new Error(message); ^
Error: Command failed: FOR /F "tokens=5" %a in ('netstat -ano ^| findstr :9009') do taskkill /F /PID %a at genericNodeError (node:internal/errors:983:15) at wrappedFn (node:internal/errors:537:14) at checkExecSyncError (node:child_process:882:11) at execSync (node:child_process:954:15)
Can you try again?
There was another comment that mentioned that there's an issue with port killing code on Windows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43614145
I just published a new version of the @browsermcp/mcp library (version 0.1.1) that handles the error better until I can investigate further so it should hopefully work now if you're using @browsermcp/mcp@latest.
FWIW, Claude Desktop currently has a bug where it tries to start the server twice, which is why the MCP server tries to kill the process from a previous invocation: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/issues/812
It's working now with the 0.1.0 for me. But I will let you know if I experience any issues once I get updated to 0.1.1.
Thanks, great job! I like it overall, but I noticed it has some issues entering text in forms, even on google.com. It's able to find a workaround and insert the searched text in the URL, but it would be nice if the entry into forms worked well for UI testing.
I was able to make it work like this:
1. Kill your Claude Desktop app
2. Click "Connect" in the browser extension.
3. Quickly start your Calude Desktop app.
It will work 50% of the time - I guess the timing must be just right for it to work. Hopefully, the developers can improve this.
Now on to testing :)
I don't see how an MCP can be useful for browsing the net and doing things like shopping as has been suggested. Large companies such as CloudFlare have spent millions on, and made a business from, bot detection and blocking.
Do we suppose they will just create a backdoor to allow _some_ bots in? If they do that how long will it be before other bots impersonate them? It seems like a bit of a fad from my small mind.
Suppose it does become a thing, what then? We end up with an internet which is heavily optimised for bots (arguably it already is to an extent) and unusable for humans?
Wild.
There are already plenty of services that provide residential proxies and captcha bypass pretty cheaply.
https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-unlocker https://2captcha.com/pricing
> Suppose it does become a thing, what then? We end up with an internet which is heavily optimised for bots (arguably it already is to an extent) and unusable for humans?
As opposed to the Web we now have, which is heavily optimized for... wasting human life.
What you're asking for, what "large companies such as CloudFlare have spent millions on", is verifying that on the other end of the connection is a web browser, and behind that web browser there is a human being that's being made to needlessly suffer and waste their limited lifespans, as they tediously work their way through the UI maze like a good little lab rat, watching ads at every turn of the corridor, while being constantly surveilled.
Or do you believe there is some other reason why you should care about whether you're interacting with a "human" (really: an user agent called "web browser") vs. "not human" (really: any other user agent)?
The relationship between the commercial web and its users is antagonistic - businesses make money through friction, by making it more difficult for users to accomplish their goals. That's why we never got the era of APIs and web automation for users. That's why we're dealing with tons of bespoke shitty SPAs instead of consistent interfaces - because no store wants to make it easy for you to comparison-shop, or skip their upsells, or efficiently search through the stock; no news service wants you to skip ads or make focused searches, etc.
As users, we've lost the battle for APIs and continue to be forced to use the "manual web" (with active cooperation of the browser vendors, too). MCP feels promising because we're in a moment in time, however brief, where LLMs can navigate the "manual web" for us, shielding us from all the malicious bullshit (ads, marketing copy, funneling, call to actions, confusing design, dark patterns, less dark patterns, the fact that your store is a bloated SPA instead of an endpoint for a generic database querying frontend, and so on) while remaining mostly impervious to it. This will not last long - the vendors de-facto ruling the web have every reason to shut it down (or turn it around and use LLMs against us). But for now, it works.
Adversarial interoperability is the name of the game. LLMs, especially combined with tool use (and right tools), make it much easier and much more accessible than ever before. For however brief a moment.
Sorry it wasn't entirely clear that I was by no means saying the web in its current form is anything close to what it could/should be. My main point was that, by making backdoors for MCPs there will be a new possible entry point for bad actors by exploiting said backdoor.
As for the optimisation to _waste human life_ I do agree but the reality is that the sites which waste the majority of human life/time are the ones which would not be automated by the MCP and would, ultimately, see more 'real' usage by virtue of the fact that your average human will have more time to mindlessly scroll their favourite echo-chamber.
Then we have the whole other debate of whether we really believe that the VC funders whom are largely responsible for the current state of the web will continue pumping money into something which would hurt their bottom line from another angle?
Fair enough. Thanks for clarifying. I agree with what you're saying in this comment.
On the topic of:
> whether we really believe that the VC funders whom are largely responsible for the current state of the web will continue pumping money into something which would hurt their bottom line from another angle?
No, I don't believe that at all - which is why I keep saying the current situation is an anomaly, a brief moment in time. LLMs deployed in form of general-purpose chatbots/agents are giving too much power to the people, which is already becoming disruptive to many businesses, so that power will be gradually taken away. Expect less general-purpose AI agents, and more "AI powered features" that shackle LLMs behind some limited UI, to ensure you can only get as much benefit from AI as it fits the vendors' business strategies.
Most thing that do this kind of fingerprinting bot detection aren't looking for a browser that's pretending to be a human, they're looking for other programs that are pretending to be a browser.
> Do we suppose they will just create a backdoor to allow _some_ bots in?
That, and maybe they will as CF seem quite big on MCP.[0] Or people just bypass the bot detection. It's already not terribly difficult to do; people in the sneaker bot and ticket scalping communities have long had bypasses for all the major companies.
I mean, we can all imagine bad use-cases of bots, but there's also the pros: the internet wastes loads of human time. I still remember needing to browse marketplaces real estate listings with terrible search and notification functionality to find a flat... shudders. Unbelievable amount of hours wasted.
If fewer people are able to build bots that can index a larger number of sites and give better searching capabilities, for instance, where sites are unable to provide this, I'm personally all for it. For many sites, it's that they lack the in-house development expertise and probably they wouldn't even mind.
[0]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/agents/model-context-proto... etc
Can you add a license to your code along with open sourcing the chrome extension?
Ideally, shouldn't this be the native experience of most "sites" on the internet? We've built an entire user experience around serving users rich, two dimensional visual content that is not machine-readable and are now building a natural language command line layer on top of it. Why not get rid of the middleware and present users a direct natural language interface to the application layer?
Why use this over Puppeteer or Playwright extensions?
The Puppeteer MCP server doesn't work well because it requires CSS selectors to interact with elements. It makes up CSS selectors rather than reading the page and generating working selectors.
The Playwright MCP server is great! Currently Browser MCP is largely an adaptation of the Playwright MCP server to use with your actual browser rather than creating a new one each time. This allows you to reuse your existing Chrome profile so that you don't need to log in to each service all over again and avoids bot detection which often triggers when using the fresh browser instances created by Playwright.
I also plan to add other useful tools (e.g. Browser MCP currently supports a tool to get the console logs which is useful for automated debugging) which will likely diverge from the Playwright MCP server features.
by the way, you can indeed access your personal context with Playwright. just `launchPersistentContext()` and set the userDataDir to that of your existing Chrome install:
https://playwright.dev/docs/api/class-browsertype#browser-ty...
Ooo, i like that. one of the most annoying points has been 'not sharing' the browser context. i'll def check it out
Any plans to make a Firefox version?
Browser MCP uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to automate the browser so it currently only works for Chromium-based browsers.
Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't expose WebDriver BiDi (the standardized version of CDP) to browser extensions AFAIK (someone please correct me if I'm mistaken!), so I don't think I can support it even if I tried.
Just found this[0] implementation roadmap on Mozilla's wiki, recently updated too! At least it's actively being worked on.
Not going to lie, this makes me happy.
[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebDriver/RemoteProtocol/WebDriver_...
In the Task Automation demo, how does it know all of the attributes of the motorcycle he is trying to sell? Is it relying on the underlying LLM's embedded knowledge? But then how would it know the price and mileage? Is there some underlying document not referenced in the demo? Because that information is not in the prompt.
I mean no disrespect, but this looks like an outdated clone of https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp
https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/blob/main/src/to... https://github.com/BrowserMCP/mcp/blob/main/src/tools/tool.t...
Hey Pavel, this is Namu, the creator of Browser MCP.
You’re right, this is an adaptation of Playwright MCP to automate the user’s local browser as mentioned in the GitHub README and here:
- https://github.com/BrowserMCP/mcp/blob/3e6824de6f36eba7d2d3b...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43613905
Thanks for all your work to Playwright and Playwright MCP. I’m a big fan!
(For those not familiar, Pavel is the largest contributor to both Playwright and Playwright MCP: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/graphs/contributors, https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/graphs/contribut...)
Hi Namu, all good! Feel free to send us the patches and work upstream, would be happy to see you on board!
From the Browser MCP README.md:
> Credits: Browser MCP was adapted from the Playwright MCP server
I just run into a bunch of errors on my Windows machine + Chrome when connected over remote-ssh. Extension installed, tab enabled, npx updated/installed, etc.
2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [info] rmcp: Starting new stdio process with command: npx @browsermcp/mcp@latest
2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [error] rmcp: Client error for command spawn npx ENOENT
2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [error] rmcp: Error in MCP: spawn npx ENOENT
2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [info] rmcp: Client closed for command
2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [error] rmcp: Error in MCP: Client closed
2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [info] rmcp: Handling ListOfferings action
2025-04-07 10:57:11.606 [error] rmcp: No server info found
---
EDIT: Ended up fixing it by patching index.js. killProcessOnPort() was the problem. Can hit me up if you have questions, I cannot figure out how to put readable code in HN after all these years with the fake markdown syntax they use.
> I cannot figure out how to put readable code in HN after all these years with the fake markdown syntax they use.
Not that HN supports much in the way of markup, but code blocks are actually the same as Markdown: indent (by 2 spaces or more, in HN's syntax; Markdown calls for 4 or more, so they're compatible).
Thanks for the report and the update! I'd love to hear about what you changed — how can I get in touch? I didn't see anything in your HN profile. Feel free to email me at admin@browsermcp.io
Still slightly confused on what MCPs are but looking at this it does look useful
A plugin protocol that allows “applications” to interact with LLMs.
wouldn't it be for LLMs to interact with applications?
Well they do work two ways. Extend an application to access an LLM, and allow an LLM to get context from an application.
For LLMs to interact with applications (without a two way protocol) is achievable just with tools/functions.
A protocol (the P in MCP) for LLMs to use tools.
This is really well done! Very cool.
I wonder if it's possible to add such plugins to election apps (e.g.: Slack). It would be such a nice experience if I could just connect my AI of choice to a local app.
Good idea! I'm sure this is possible since it looks like playwright can control electron apps. https://playwright.dev/docs/api/class-electronapplication
election -> Electron
Setting this up for claude desktop and cursor was alright. Works well out of the box with little setup, and I like that it attached to my active browser tab. Keep up the good work.
MCP seems to be JavaScript's trojan horse into AI.
"Trojan horse"? 95% of people currently access AI via web or mobile app; those are pretty JS-dominated, no?
Bot Detection Evasion is becoming an increasingly relevant topic. Even for non-abusive automation, it's now a necessary consideration.
Interesting research and reading via the HN search portal: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bot+detection
I literally started working on the same exact idea last night haha. Great work OP. I'm curious, how are you feeding the web data to the LLM? Are you just passing the entire page contents to it and then having it interact with the page based on CSS selectors/xpath? Also, what are your thoughts on letting it do its own scripting to automate certain tasks?
What I don't like about LLMs is that people keep re-inventing the wheel over and over. For example, we've been able to control browsers using GPT for about 2 years now:
- https://github.com/mayt/BrowserGPT
- https://github.com/TaxyAI/browser-extension
- https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use
- https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/skyvern
- https://github.com/m1guelpf/browser-agent
- https://github.com/richardyc/Chrome-GPT
- https://github.com/handrew/browserpilot
- https://github.com/ishan0102/vimGPT
- https://github.com/Jiayi-Pan/GPT-V-on-Web
I think this is noteworthy in that it is using what is increasingly becoming the dominant API protocol for LLM.
Just because the wheel exists doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to make it better by applying new knowledge and technologies to it.
Competitors don’t just challenge you, they push you to deliver your best work.
none of these have stuck right. And none of them work well enough that all web dev agencies no longer have to worry about e2e testing. (or do some of them? Maybe the market is simply that inefficient).
I don't see this being a solution for full e2e regression testing. Having to run inference for each command/test seems expensive. I do think there's room for self-healing tests after failure.
If this works well enough couldn't you save the selectors and only use inference running the test for the first time and when the UI has changed. Cheaper than dev?
that would be a good feature. though there are already playback and record tools to do just that. I really only see this for low-code users who want to automate a novel task.
This is a bit disingenuous, no? None of these have actually taken off.
Or just use Playwright MCP: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp
This is cool. I'm curious why you chose to use an extension, rather than getting the user to run Chrome with remote debugging turned on?
An extension is more user-friendly! I leave Chrome open basically 24/7 and having to create a new Chrome instance via the command line just to use Browser MCP just felt like too high of a barrier.
Not OP but I suspect it is because of this (mentioned on their page):
'Avoids bot detection and CAPTCHAs by using your real browser fingerprint.'
I don't think remote debugging by itself on a normal chrome profile is detectable
Exposing Chrome CDP is a terrible idea from a security and privacy perspective. You get the keys to the whole kingdom (and expose them on a standard port with a well documented API). All security features of the web can be bypassed, and then some, as CDP exposes even more capabilities than chrome extensions and without any form of supervision.
You're talking about exposing Chrome CDP to the wider internet, right? Or are you highlighting these dangers in the local context?
In the local context as well. Unlike say the docker socket which is protected by default using unix permissions, the CDP protocol has no authorization, authentication or permission mechanism.
Anything on your machine (such as a rogue browser extension or a malicious npm/pypi package) could scan for this and just get all your cookies - and that's only the beginning of your problems.
CDP can access any origin, any data stored (localStorage, indexedDB ...), any javascript heap, cross iframe and origin boundaries, run almost undetectable code that uses your sessions without you knowing, and the list is very long. CDP was never meant to expose a real browser in an untrusted context.
I'm sure its about the cookies/sessions but I do recall you can load cookies from another browser?
Good, just what we needed. More bots browsing the internet. Somedays I think I am not 100% against of every website having a captcha...
Not out of the realm of possibility that this very comment was written by a bot prompted to write a negative response to a given piece of content.
Not, human tired of creating content to put online and being consumed not by people but by bots or any other form of mechanical consumption that I don't like. As the owner of the content I think I have the right to set that preference, don't you think?
Yeah this is definitely a bad English bot
It's a developer tool
Then it should be limited to localhost or something similar.
It can be, just do that when you install it
What if you are using domain names for your local environment or a cloud environment like IDX or you want to automate the testing of the UAT environment?
thank you for this. Using my own browser helps me automate tasks on sites I 'd typically get detected using automation. Works like a charm! Hope you continue to work on the repo.
This is great. Especially debugging frontend issue on localhost or staging.
Also works flawlessly with augment code.com too!
I like this. It would be interesting to use it for when I need to use authenticated browser sessions.
This one also uses aria snapshots formatted as yaml. This will quickly exceed context limits.
Pretty cool, do you know of a version of this that supports the new remote MCP protocol
We work on something similar and aim to be the huggingface hub for automations you can run in your browser[0], with built-in support for MCP SSE.
Use the pre-built Trails[1][2] as MCP servers or create and publish your own with a familiar puppeteer-like API, powered by your or your friends browsers.
0: https://herd.garden
1: https://herd.garden/trails/@herd/browser
2: https://herd.garden/trails/@omneity/serp
Can u expose the sdk as a react component to be used inside an app ?
Is anyone successfully running MCPs / Claude Desktop on Linux?
I am running this OK in Ubuntu 2404 : https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian Claude Desktop for Debian-based Linux distributions
From Claude I have connected to these MCP servers OK : @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem, @executeautomation/playwright-mcp-server.
I have connected to OP's extension (browsermcp.io) from vsCode (and clicked 1 tab button OK), but not from Claude desktop so far (I get Cannot find module 'node:path'; which is require-d in npm/lib/cli.js; tried node 18,20,22; some suggestions here : https://medium.com/@aleksej.gudkov/error-cannot-find-module-... ).
So why do I need an editor(Cusror)? How does a non-coder use it?
If you're a non-coder, use it with Claude Desktop.
Do you respect robots.txt so administrators can block this tool?
Should I be blocked if I ask Claude Desktop to lower the prices in all of my Craigslist ads by 10%?
Do user agents doing work for users need to respect robots.txt? If yes, does chrome?
Any scraper is also a “user agent doing work for users”. Which ones should respect robots.tx?
Does the user agent fit the definition of a web crawler? If so, then observe robots.txt. This one does not, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
i want to add this for my project (which use wasm) but rustlang/socket2 WASI support is not merged yet. after that rust CDP will work.
How does this compare to Anthropic's Computer Use?
awesome! For the Cursor / React / Click to Add 2 example, can we also have it write a unit/e2e regression test?
author replied on Twitter:
> that's a great use case! the aria snapshot that browser mcp generates is enough to write tests for playwright using its role-based locators, but i may add a get_page_html tool in the same way that they're considering: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/issues/103
https://x.com/roadtoramen/status/1909356255866733044
How does it compare to playwright mcp?
works better than puppet mcp for me but having issues with keyboard events and actions on some websites.
> Private > Since automation happens locally, your browser activity stays on your device and isn't sent to remote servers.
I think this is bullshit. Isn't the dom or whatever sent to the model api?
Of course, you're sending data to the AI model, but the "private" aspect is contrasting automating using a local browser vs. automating using a remote browser.
When you automate using a remote browser, another service (not the AI model) gets all of the browsing activity and any information you send (e.g. usernames and passwords) that's required for the automation.
With Browser MCP, since you're automating locally, your sensitive data and browser activity (apart from the results of MCP tool calls that's sent to the AI model) stay on your device.
I think we need to be very careful & intentional about the language we use with these kinds of tools, especially now that the MCP floodgates have been opened. You aren't just exposing the users browsing data to which ever model they are using, you are also exposing it any tools they may be allowing as well.
A lot of non technical people are using these tools to "vibe" their way to productivity. I would explicitly tell them that potentially "all" of their browsing data is going to be exposed to their LLM client and they need to use this at their own risk.
Can these things automatically solve recaptcha? That's the only AI browser feature that I have a real use for.
https://github.com/dessant/buster
Thanks but idea is ok but it is not working smoothly.
neat, but instead of asking me to install browser extension, can you just bundle a browser in the MCP server?
this is the way
WARNING for Cursor users:
Cursor is currently stuck using an outdated snapshot of the VSCode Marketplace, meaning several extensions within Cursor remain affected by high-severity CVEs that have already been patched upstream in VSCode. As a result, Cursor users unknowingly remain vulnerable to known security issues. This issue has been acknowledged but remains unresolved: https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/1602#issuecomment...
Given Cursor's rising popularity, users should be aware of this gap in security updates. Until the Cursor team resolves the marketplace sync issue, caution is advised when using certain extensions.
I've flagged it here, apologies for the repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43609572
I am surprised that the VSCode team hasn't gone after them for mirroring the marketplace, as the Visual Studio team made it very clear that they don't want anybody to do that -- it is their marketplace.
It seems that there is one sane PM left at VScode who knows that such move would only lead to MSFT losing more PR. And anti-trust scrutiny?
Why? This seems fine.