Chrome DevTools MCP (2025) (developer.chrome.com)
565 points by xnx a day ago
dataviz1000 a day ago
I use Playwright to intercept all requests and responses and have Claude Code navigate to a website like YouTube and click and interact with all the elements and inputs while recording all the requests and responses associated with each interaction. Then it creates a detailed strongly typed API to interact with any website using the underlying API.
Yes, I know it likely breaks everybody's terms of service but at the same time I'm not loading gigabytes of ads, images, markup, to accomplish things.
If anyone is interested I can take some time and publish it this week.
felarof 10 minutes ago
I do this via BrowserOS -- https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS
It has an in-built MCP server and I use it with claude code, codex and like it quite a lot.
sidwyn an hour ago
I do something similar [1] but it leverages WebMCP (see Amazon example [2]). Could probably turn it into a strongly typed API.
[1] https://github.com/sidwyn/webmcp-tool-library
[2] https://github.com/sidwyn/webmcp-tool-library/blob/main/cont...
bredren 20 hours ago
I also do this. My primary use case is for reproducing page layout and styling at any given tree in the dom. So, capturing various states of a component etc.
I also use it to automatically retrieve page responsiveness behavior in complex web apps. It uses playwright to adjust the width and monitor entire trees for exact changes which it writes structured data that includes the complete cascade of styles relevant with screenshots to support the snapshots.
There are tools you can buy that let you do this kind of inspection manually, but they are designed for humans. So, lots of clickety-clackety and human speed results.
---
My first reaction to seeing this FP was why are people still releasing MCPs? So far I've managed to completely avoid that hype loop and went straight to building custom CLIs even before skills were a thing.
I think people are still not realizing the power and efficiency of direct access to things you want and skills to guide the AI in using the access effectively.
Maybe I'm missing something in this particular use case?
ranyume 3 hours ago
> My first reaction to seeing this FP was why are people still releasing MCPs?
MCPs are more difficult to use. You need to use an agent to use the tools, can't do it manually easily. I wonder if some people see that friction as a feature.
AlphaSite 16 hours ago
its mostly because MCPs handle auth in a standardised way and give you a framework you can layer things like auth, etc on top of.
Without it youre stuck with the basic http firewall, etc which is extremely dangerous and this is maybe the 1 opportunity we have to do this.
halJordan 20 hours ago
I love how HN is loving this idea when it's the exact same thing Anthropic and OpenAi (and every other llm maker) did.
It's God's gift to them when it lets them bypass ads and dl copyrighted material. But it's Satan's curse on humanity when the Zuck does it to train his llm and dl copyrighted material.
deaux 18 hours ago
Both scale and purpose make them completely different things. You're acting as if they're the same when they're not.
eipi10_hn 16 hours ago
I won't comment about dl but ads are trackers and spyware for me. I don't spy on websites' owners, I have my human rights to stop those trackers.
Zuck serves ads/spywares to other users, he deserves to taste his own medicines, not me.
coldtea 8 hours ago
Yes, it's a god's gift when the average user can do it, and satan's curse what a hated fucking mega-corp is doing it.
Where's the contradiction?
friendzis 12 hours ago
You can see this pattern in many different topics: updoots are highly correlated with a positive answer to "do I personally get to profit"?
cyberax 15 hours ago
I would love to pay for content. I'm _paying_ for YouTube Premium.
But heck. Do I hate the YouTube interface, it degraded far past usability.
tclancy 19 hours ago
So you’re that Hal Jordan then? Why would a Green Lantern feel the need to defend either? I feel like the Guardians would not accept your arguments as soon as you got to Oa, poozer. I guess what I am saying is don’t have a famous name. Seems obvious.
miki123211 10 hours ago
You conflate web crawling for inference with web crawling for training.
Web crawling for training is when you ingest content on a mass scale, usually indiscriminately, usually with a dumb crawler for scale's sake, for the purposes of training an LLM. You don't really care whether one particular website is in the dataset (unless it's the size of Reddit), you just want a large, diverse, high-quality data mix.
Web crawling for inference is when a user asks a targeted question, you do a web search, and fetch exactly those resources that are likely to be relevant to that search. Nothing ends up in the training data, it's just context enrichment.
People have a much larger issue with crawling for training than for inference (though I personally think both are equally ok).
swyx 32 minutes ago
yes please! i need a "comment to follow" functionality on HN
Axsuul 21 hours ago
Why even use Playwright for this? I feel like Claude just needs agent-browser and it can generate deterministic code from it.
dsrtslnd23 20 hours ago
you mean this one? https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser
thefreeman 17 hours ago
You can just start claude with the —chrome flag too and it will connect to the chrome extension.
kolinko 8 hours ago
Please do.
Did you compare playwright with mcp? Why one over another?
I use MCP usually, because I heard it’s less detectable than playwright, and more robust against design changes, but I didn’t compare/test myself
schainks 21 hours ago
Very interested. Would even pay for an api for this. I am doing something similar with vibium and need something more token efficient.
hugs 14 hours ago
have you tried vibium's cli + agent skill?
cbility 6 hours ago
I use chrome devtools MCP to the same end - it works great for me. Interested in what advantages you see in using Playwright over chrome devtools?
defen a day ago
Would this hypothetically be able to download arbitrary videos from youtube without the constant yt-dlp arms race?
dawnerd 21 hours ago
Don’t know how this could be more stable than ytdlp. When issues come up they’re fixed really quickly.
dataviz1000 21 hours ago
> yt-dlp arms race
I don't know anything about yt-dlp.
It would probably help people who want to go to a concert and have a chance to beat the scalpers cornering the market on an event in 30 seconds hitting the marketplace services with 20,000 requests.
I can try to see if can bypass yt-dlp. But that is always a cat and mouse game.
phantomathkg 17 hours ago
If it can save all the video/audio fragment and call ffmpeg to join them together. Maybe?
Johnny_Bonk 21 hours ago
Yes, please do and ping me when it's done lol. Did you make it into an agent skill?
dataviz1000 21 hours ago
Exactly, it is an agent skill that interacts pressing buttons and stuff with a webpage capturing and documenting all the API requests the page makes using Playwright's request / response interception methods. It creates and strongly typed well documented API at the end.
mistyvales 2 hours ago
I would like to see this!
miohtama 20 hours ago
I just ask Claude to reverse engineer the site with Chrome MCP. It goes to work by itself, uses your Chrome logged in session cookies, etc.
zacmps 10 hours ago
I would love it if you had time to publish it!
mikrl 20 hours ago
I was doing similar by capturing XHR requests while clicking through manually, then asking codex to reverse engineer the API from the export.
Never tried that level of autonomy though. How long is your iteration cycle?
If I had to guess, mine was maybe 10-20 minutes over a few prompts.
3abiton 12 hours ago
I always used playwrite as an alternative to selenium, relatively surprised by its ability to interface with LLMs.
rkagerer 15 hours ago
I assume you're not logged into those sites, in order to avoid bans and the risk of hitting the wrong button like, say, "Delete Account".
dataviz1000 15 hours ago
It turns any authenticated browser session into a fully typed REST API proxy — exposing discovered endpoints as local Hono routes that relay requests through the browser, so cookies and auth are automatic.
The point is that it creates an API proxy in code that a Typescript server calls directly. The AI runs for about 10 minutes with codegen. The rest of the time it is just API calls to a service. Remove the endpoint for "Delete Account" and that API endpoint never gets called.
This 100% breaks everyone's terms of service. I would not recommend nor encourage using.
TimCTRL 9 hours ago
+1, publish, but how will we know when you have published...
xrd a day ago
Yes, please do!
dataviz1000 a day ago
100% I'll response to this by Friday with link to Github.
I use Patchright + Ghostery and I have a cleaver tool that uses web sockets to pass 1 second interval screenshots to the a dashboard and pointer / keyboard events to the server which allow interacting with websites so that a user can create authentication that is stored in the chrome user profile with all the cookies, history, local storage, ect.. in the cloud on a server.
Can you list some websites that don't require subscription that you would like to me to test against? I used this for Robinhood and I think Linked in would be a good example for people to use.
citizenpaul 15 hours ago
Id like to see this published as well thx!
liamdgray 20 hours ago
Please do!
toomuchtodo 21 hours ago
Please publish!
heystefan 19 hours ago
Commenting to follow up.
fuzzyfizz 12 hours ago
Wow. Yes please.
retinaros 21 hours ago
isnt it what everyone that needs web validation does?
paulirish a day ago
The DevTools MCP project just recently landed a standalone CLI: https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp/blob/m...
Great news to all of us keenly aware of MCP's wild token costs. ;)
The CLI hasn't been announced yet (sorry guys!), but it is shipping in the latest v0.20.0 release. (Disclaimer: I used to work on the DevTools team. And I still do, too)
hank1931 18 hours ago
Love the Mitch Hedberg reference! Thank you! Always good to get a little Mitch!
‘I don’t have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who’d be mad at me for saying that.’
‘I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it.’
‘I haven’t slept for ten days, because that would be too long.’
‘I like to play blackjack. I’m not addicted to gambling. I’m addicted to sitting in a semi-circle.’
paulirish 17 hours ago
"I was going to get my teeth whitened but then I said, fuck that, I'll just get a tan instead."
abhikul0 2 hours ago
It doesn't seem to work, tried the -u flag with the default address and it just couldn't connect to the existing chrome instance.
dreadnip 9 hours ago
The big upside of the MCP is that it connects to already open browser windows. I tried the skill but it always tries to open new windows. Is there a way to get the `--autoConnect` behaviour with the CLI?
albert_e 17 hours ago
Woah got this for the first time.
> Too many requests
You have exceeded a secondary rate limit.
Please wait a few minutes before you try again; in some cases this may take up to an hour. Signing in may provide a higher rate limit if you are not already signed in.
For more on scraping GitHub and how it may affect your rights, please review our Terms of Service.
commanderkeen08 21 hours ago
MCPs cost nothing in CC now with Tool Search.
cheema33 21 hours ago
> MCPs cost nothing in CC now with Tool Search.
This is incorrect. Plenty of people have run the numbers. Tool search does not fix all problems with MCP.
wahnfrieden 21 hours ago
Codex also has this…
aadishv a day ago
Someone already made a great agent skill for this, which I'm using daily, and it's been very cool!
https://github.com/pasky/chrome-cdp-skill
For example, I use codex to manage a local music library, and it was able to use the skill to open a YT Music tab in my browser, search for each album, and get the URL to pass to yt-dlp.
Do note that it only works for Chrome browsers rn, so you have to edit the script to point to a different Chromium browser's binary (e.g. I use Helium) but it's simple enough
Etheryte a day ago
On one hand, cool demo, on the other, this is horrifying in more ways than I can begin to describe. You're literally one prompt injection away from someone having unlimited access to all of your everything.
mh- a day ago
Not the person you're replying to, but: I just use a separate, dedicated Chrome profile that isn't logged into anything except what I'm working on. Then I keep the persistence, but without commingling in a way that dramatically increases the risk.
edit: upon rereading, I now realize the (different) prompt injection risk you were calling out re: the handoff to yt-dlp. Separate profiles won't save you from that, though there are other approaches.
aadishv a day ago
Of course I still watch it and have my finger on the escape key at all times :)
sheepscreek a day ago
As long as it’s gated and not turned on by default, it’s all good. They could also add a warning/sanity check similar to “allow pasting” in the console.
esperent 17 hours ago
> Most browser automation tools launch a fresh, isolated browser. This one connects to the Chrome you're already running
Is this the same as what Claude in Chrome does?
I tried that for a while and since I use Firefox and Chromium, the security problem of it seeing your tabs wasn't a big deal. Fresh Chrome install, only ever used for this exact purpose. Plus you can watch it working in real (actually very slow) time so if you did point it at something risky you can take over at any point.
For actual testing of web apps though, a skill with playwright cli in headless mode is much more effective. About 1-2k context per interaction after a bit of tuning.
paulirish a day ago
To be clear, this isn't a skill for the devtools mcp, but an independent project. It doesn't look bad, but obviously browser automation + agents is a very busy space with lots of parallel efforts.
DevTools MCP and its new CLI are maintained by the team behind Chrome DevTools & Puppeteer and it certainly has a more comprehensive feature set. I'd expect it to be more reliable, but.. hey open source competition breeds innovation and I love that. :)
(I used to work on the DevTools team. And I still do, too)
xmorse 21 hours ago
Does anyone really use these hacked up with duct tape skills? why not use something more reliable like playwriter.dev?
Mashimo 11 hours ago
Mhh, yt-dlp already has a build in youtube search, could you not use that instead of anything with AI?
mmaunder a day ago
Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful. So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it. Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic coding know. Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more flexible and many are already trained in. Playwright with headless Chromium or headed chrome is what anyone serious is using and we get all the dev and inspection tools already. And it works perfectly. This only has appeal to those starting out and confused into thinking this is the way. The answer is almost never MCP.
zeroxfe 20 hours ago
> Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic coding know.
As someone that does heavy agentic coding (using basically all the tools), this is so far from the truth. People claiming this have probably never worked in large enterprise environments where things like authentication, RBAC, rate limiting, abuse detection, centralized management/updates/ops, etc. are a huge part of the development and deployment workflow.
In these situations you can't just use skills and cli tools without a gigantic amount of retooling and increased operational and security complexity. MCP is really useful here, and allows centralized eng and ops teams to manage their services in a way that aligns with the organizations overall posture, policies, and infrastructure.
> Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful.
This part I totally agree. It's really hard to express how bad it is (and it's really disappointing.)
bloppe 18 hours ago
> you can't just use skills and cli tools without a gigantic amount of retooling and increased operational and security complexity
You're describing MCP. After all, MCP is just reinventing the OpenAPI wheel. You can just have a self-documenting REST API using OpenAPI. Put the spec in your context and your model knows how to use it. You can have all the RBAC and rate limiting and auth you want. Heck, you could even build all that complexity into a CLI tool if you want. MCP the protocol doesn't actually enable anything. And implementing an MCP server is exactly as complex as using any other established protocol if you're using all those features anyway
moritonal 19 hours ago
Given MCP is supposed to just be a standardised format for self-describing APIs, why are all the features you listed MCP related things? It sounds more like it's forced the enterprise to build such features which cli tooling didn't have?
IX-103 19 hours ago
FYI: Gemini Cli is used internally at Google. It's actually more popular than Antigravity. Google uses MCP services internally for code search (since everything is in a mono-repo you don't want to waste time grepping billions of files), accessing docs and bugs, and also accessing project specific RAG databases for expertise grounding.
Source - I know people at Google.
cheema33 21 hours ago
> Also MCP is very obviously dead
Some people will push back on this. They are holding out hope that the recent improvements Anthropic has made in this regard have improved the context rot problem with MCP. Anthropic's changes improve things a little. But it is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It helps, but not much.
The reason MCP is dying/dead is because MCP servers, once configured, bloat up context even when they are not being used. Why would anybody want that?
Use agent skills. And say goodbye to MCP. We need to move on from MCP.
maxwellg 18 hours ago
Is your agent harness dropping the entire MCP server tool description output directly into the context window? Is your agent harness always addig MCP servers to the context even when they are not being used?
MCP is a wire format protocol between clients and servers. What ends up inside the context window is the agent builder's decision.
ktoo_ 19 hours ago
> it is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It helps, but not much.
The lipstick helps? This had me in stitches. Sorry for the non-additive reply. This is the funniest way I have seen this or any other phrase explained. By far. Honestly has made my day and set me up for the whole week.
dominotw 21 hours ago
i am using notion mcp. is there a corresponding skill. also wtf is a plugin.
Rapzid 20 hours ago
The bloat problem is already out dated though. People are having the LLM pick the MCP servers it needs for a particular task up front, or picking them out-of-band, so the full list doesn't exist in the context every call.
edwinjm 19 hours ago
MCP is dead? Which cli tool should we use to instruct Chrome to open a page and click the Open button? And to read what appears in the console after clicking?
MCP permanently sacrifice a chunk of the context window? And a skill for you cli is free?
rsalus 21 hours ago
MCP is very much not dead. centralized remote MCP servers are incredibly useful. also bespoke CLIs still require guidance for models to use effectively, so it's clear that token efficiency is still an issue regardless.
Torn 21 hours ago
Tbh I find self-documenting CLIs (e.g. with a `--help` flag, and printing correct usage examples when LLMs make things up) plus a skill that's auto invoked to be pretty reliable. CLIs can do OAuth dances too just fine.
MCP's remaining moats I think are:
- No-install product integrations (just paste in mcp config into app)
- Non-developer end users / no shell needed (no terminal)
- Multi-tenant auth (many users, dynamic OAuth)
- Security sandboxing (restrict what agents can do), credential sandboxing (agents never see secrets)
- Compliance/audit (structured logs, schema enforcement)?
If you're a developer building for developers though, CLI seems to be a clear winner right
abhis3798 21 hours ago
I see remote MCP servers as a great interface to consume api responses. The idea that you essentially make your apis easily available to agents to bring in relevant context is a powerful one.
When folks say MCP is dead, I don't get it. What other alternatives exist in place of MCP? Arbitrary code via curl/sdks to call a remote endpoint?
mattnewton 21 hours ago
I think cli’s are more token efficient- the help menu is loaded only when needed, and the output is trivially pipe able to grep or jq to filter out what the model actually wants
nojito 21 hours ago
all you need is a simple skills.md and maybe a couple examples and codex picks up my custom toolkit and uses it.
sega_sai 21 hours ago
I don't know if this just anecdotal random impression, but in a last week or two I had mostly good experience with Google cli. While previously I constantly complained about it. I have been using it together with codex, and I would not say that one is much better than another.
It is hard to say nowadays, when things change so quickly
sunaookami 6 hours ago
Gemini 3.1 Pro through Gemini CLI always tries to write files with cat instead of using the write_file tool, it's awful at tool use.
girvo 21 hours ago
I know it’s a bit of a tangent but man you’re right re. Gemini CLI. It’s woefully bad, barely works. Maybe because I was a “free” user trying it out at the time, but it was such a bad experience it turned me off subscribing to whatever their coding plan is called today.
ElCapitanMarkla 20 hours ago
I had this exp too, but I trialed the pro sub a few weeks back and it has been great. I have no complaints this time
luckydata 21 hours ago
it's not the CLI, it's the model. The model wasn't trained to do that kind of work, was trained to do one shot coding, not sustained back and forth until it gets it right like Claude and ChatGPT.
hu3 19 hours ago
> Also MCP is very obviously dead...
Couldn't have been more wrong. MCP despite its manageable downsides is leagues ahead of anything else in many ways.
The fact that SoTA models are trained to handle MCP should be hint enough to the observant.
I probably build one MCP tool per week at work.
And every project I work on gets its own MCP tool too. It's invaluable to have specialized per-project tooling instead of a bunch of heterogeneous scripts+glue+prayer.
Anything specialized goes into an MCP.
synalx 14 hours ago
Antigravity's coding agent is worlds apart from Gemini CLI, though.
danpalmer 20 hours ago
> So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it.
I use it extensively, many of my colleagues do. I get a ton of value out of it. Some prefer Antigravity, but I prefer Gemini CLI. I get fairly long trajectories out of it, and some of my colleagues are getting day-long trajectories out of it. It has improved massively since I started using it when it first came out.
hugs 14 hours ago
some serious people use vibium instead. (full-disclosure: "some serious people" is me.)
spiderfarmer 21 hours ago
MCP is not just used for coding.
quotemstr 20 hours ago
> Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more flexible and many are already trained in
What about all the CLI tools not baked into the model's priors?
Every time someone says "extensibility mechanism X is dead!", I think "Well, I guess that guy isn't doing anything that needs to extend the statistical average of 2010s-era Reddit"
boomskats a day ago
Been using this one for a while, mostly with codex on opencode. It's more reliable and token efficient than other devtools protocol MCPs i've tried.
Favourite unexpected use case for me was telling gemini to use it as a SVG editing repl, where it was able to produce some fantastic looking custom icons for me after 3-4 generate/refresh/screenshot iterations.
Also works very nicely with electron apps, both reverse engineering and extending.
zxspectrumk48 a day ago
I found this one working amazingly well (same idea - connect to existing session): https://github.com/remorses/playwriter
cheema33 21 hours ago
How does this compare with playwright CLI?
Torn 21 hours ago
I personally found playwright-cli, and agent-browser which wraps playwright, both more token-efficient than using the raw mcp.
Odd that this article from Dec 2025 has been posted to the top of HN though
akvadrako 11 hours ago
Its easier to connect to existing sessions in your main browser.
EGreg 21 hours ago
It’s made by Google and comes with Chrome
LauraMedia 10 hours ago
Is this really the state of AI in 2026?
It takes over your entire browser to center a div... and then fails to do so?
re5i5tor 6 hours ago
Lots of MCP hate, and some love, in the comments.
80% of MCPs are thin wrappers over APIs . Yes they stink.
A well written remote OAuth MCP need not stink. Tons of advantages starting with strong security baked in.
I like Cloudflare Code Mode as an MCP pattern. Two tools, search and execute.
1M Opus 4.6 also reduces the penalties of MCP’s context approach. Along with tool search etc.
recroad 19 hours ago
I've been using TideWave[1] for the last few months and it has this built-in. It started off as an Elixir/LiveView thing but now they support popular JavaScript frameworks and RoR as well. For those who like this, check it out. It even takes it further and has access to the runtime of your app (not just the browser).
The agent basically is living inside your running app with access to databases, endpoints etc. It's awesome.
galaxyLogic 18 hours ago
Interesting. Does it only work with known frameworks like Next, React etc. or could I use it with my plain Node.js app which produces browser-output?
recroad 18 hours ago
No, doesn't use work with server-side only apps.
guard402 14 hours ago
We tested this — the default take_snapshot path (Accessibility.getFullAXTree) is safe. It filters display:none elements because they're excluded from the accessibility tree.
But evaluate_script is the escape hatch. If an agent runs document.body.textContent instead of using the AX tree, hidden injections in display:none divs show up in the output. innerText is safe (respects CSS visibility), textContent is not (returns all text nodes regardless of styling).
The gap: the agent decides which extraction method to use, not the user. When the AX tree doesn't return enough text, a plausible next step is evaluate_script with textContent — which is even shown as an example in the docs.
Also worth noting: opacity:0 and font-size:0 bypass even the safe defaults. The AX tree includes those because the elements are technically 'rendered' and accessible to screen readers. display:none is just the most common hiding technique, not the only one.
nubsero 16 hours ago
I’ve been experimenting with a similar approach using Playwright, and the biggest takeaway for me was how much “hidden API” most modern websites actually have.
Once you start mapping interactions → network calls, a lot of UI complexity just disappears. It almost feels like the browser becomes a reverse-engineering tool for undocumented APIs.
That said, I do think there’s a tradeoff people don’t talk about enough:
- Sites change frequently, so these inferred APIs can be brittle - Auth/session handling gets messy fast - And of course, the ToS / ethical side is a gray area
Still, for personal automation or internal tooling, it’s insanely powerful. Way more efficient than driving full browser sessions for everything.
Curious how others are handling stability — are you just regenerating these mappings periodically, or building some abstraction layer on top?
Igor_Wiwi 7 hours ago
I can't make it run under WSL with Claude Code, anyone succeeded in this?
tonyhschu a day ago
Very cool. I do something like this but with Playwright. It used to be a real token hog though, and got expensive fast. So much so that I built a wrapper to dump results to disk first then let the agent query instead. https://uisnap.dev/
Will check this out to see if they’ve solved the token burn problem.
esperent 17 hours ago
I use playwright CLI. Wrote a skill for it, and after a bit of tuning it's about 1-2k context per interaction which is fine. The key was that Claude only needs screenshots initially and then can query the dev tools for logs as needed.
Torn 21 hours ago
Mostly, yes: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli
mambodog 21 hours ago
my workaround for this was to make a wrapper mcp server which uses claude haiku to summarize the page snapshot returned in the response of each playwright mcp call, and that has worked pretty well for me: https://github.com/jsdf/playwright-slim-mcp
danielraffel 15 hours ago
I asked Claude to use this with the new scheduled tasks /loop skill to update my Oscar picks site every five minutes during tonight’s awards show. It simply visited the Oscars' realtime feed via Chrome DevTools, and updated my picks and pushed to gh pages. It even handled the tie correctly.
https://danielraffel.me/2026/03/16/my-oscar-2026-picks/
I know I could just use claude --chrome, but I’m used to this excellent MCP server.
egeozcan 15 hours ago
Very cool idea and site! I wish claude and others could parse video streams then you could even create your own feed.
dt3ft 11 hours ago
Neat idea :)
jasonjmcghee 18 hours ago
I had fun playing with it + WebMCP this weekend, but I think, similarly to how claude code / codex + MCP require SKILL.md, websites might too.
We could put them in a dedicated tag:
<script type="text/skill+markdown">
---
name: ...
description ...
---
...
</script>
And then add some javascript functions to wrap it / simplify required tokens.
Made a repo and a website if anyone is interested: https://webagentskills.dev/
hugs 15 hours ago
i wish more people knew or cared about web standards vs proprietary protocols. the webdriver bidi protocol took the good parts of cdp and made it a w3c standard, but no one knows about it. some of the people who do know about it, find one thing they don't like and give up. let's not keep giving megacorporations outsized influence and control over the web and the tools we use with it. let's celebrate standards and make them awesome.
silverwind a day ago
I found Firefox with https://github.com/padenot/firefox-devtools-mcp to work better then the default Chrome MCP, is seems much faster.
babas03 17 hours ago
Great to see the standalone CLI shipping in alongside this! There’s been a lot of talk today about MCP 'context bloat,' but providing a direct bridge to active DevTools sessions is something a standard headless CLI can’t replicate easily. The ability to select an element in the Elements panel and immediately 'delegate' the fix to an agent is exactly the kind of hybrid workflow that makes DevTools so powerful.
vinmay 16 hours ago
For something like Chrome DevTools MCP with authenticated browser sessions, the specific risk is credentials in the browser context + any SEND capability reachable from the same entry points. If a page can inject a prompt that triggers a tool call, and that call path can also reach outbound network I/O, you have an exfiltration vector without needing shell access at all.
NiekvdMaas a day ago
Also works nicely together with agent-browser (https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser) using --auto-connect
rossvc a day ago
I've been using the DevTools MCP for months now, but it's extremely token heavy. Is there an alternative that provides the same amount of detail when it comes to reading back network requests?
nerdsniper a day ago
It's probably not fully optimized and could be compacted more with just some effort, and further with clever techniques, but browser state/session data will always use up a ton of tokens because it's a ton of data. There's not really a way around that. AI's have a surprising "intuition" about problems that often help them guess at solutions based on insufficient information (and they guess correctly more often than I expect they should). But when their intuition isn't enough and you need to feed them the real logs/data...it's always gonna use a bunch of tokens.
This is one place where human intuition helps a ton today. If you can find the most relevant snippets and give the AI just the right context, it does a much better job.
Torn 21 hours ago
DimitriBouriez 21 hours ago
i'm experimenting with a different approach (no CDP/ARIA trees, just Chrome extension messaging that returns a numbered list of interactive elements). Way lighter on tokens and undetectable but still very experimental : https://github.com/DimitriBouriez/navagent-mcp
mmaunder a day ago
Yes. CLI. Always CLI. Never MCP. Ever. You’re welcome.
flash_us0101 14 hours ago
CLI is great when you know what command to run. MCP is great when the agent decides what to run - it discovers tools without you scripting the interaction.
The real problem isn't MCP vs CLI, it's that MCP originally loaded every tool definition into context upfront. A typical multi-server setup (GitHub, Slack, Sentry, Grafana, Splunk) consumes ~55K tokens in definitions before Claude does any work. Tool selection accuracy also degrades past 30-50 tools.
Anthropic's Tool Search fixes this with per-tool lazy loading - tools are defined with defer_loading: true, Claude only sees a search index, and full schemas load on demand for the 3-5 tools actually needed. 85% token reduction. The original "everything upfront" design was wrong, but the protocol is catching up.
nerdsniper 21 hours ago
That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead.
RALaBarge 19 hours ago
I made a websocket proxy + chrome extension to give control of the DOM to agents for my middleware app: https://github.com/RALaBarge/browserbox
The thing I am working on is improving at the moment agentic tool usage success rates for my research and I use this as a proxy to access everything with the cookies I allow in the session.
raw_anon_1111 a day ago
I don’t do any serious web development and haven’t for 25 years aside from recently vibe coding internal web admin portals for back end cloud + app dev projects. But I did recently have to implement a web crawler for a customer’s site for a RAG project using Chromium + Playwrite in a Docker container deployed to Lambda.
I ran the Docker container locally for testing. Could a web developer test using Claude + Chromium in a Docker container without using their real Chrome instance?
vesselapi 19 hours ago
Yes, running Chromium in a Docker container works well for this. There are prebuilt images like https://hub.docker.com/r/browserless/chrome that give you a headless instance you can connect to via CDP (Playwright, Puppeteer). Keeps everything isolated from your actual browser profile and credentials.
bartek_gdn 20 hours ago
Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
senand a day ago
I suggest to use https://github.com/simonw/rodney instead
meowface a day ago
Unfortunately there are like a billion competitors to this right now (including Playwright MCP, Playwright CLI, the new baked-in Playwright feature in Codex /experimental, Claude Code for Chrome...) and I can never quite decide if or when I should try to switch. I'm still just using the ordinary Playwright MCP server in both Codex and Claude Code, for the time being.
bartek_gdn 20 hours ago
I would use whatever you are comfortable with, I wanted a similar tool so I coded my own. Smaller API so that understand what is going on and it is easy not to get lost
speedgoose a day ago
Interesting. MCP APIs can be useful for humans too.
Chrome's dev tools already had an API [1], but perhaps the new MCP one is more user friendly, as one main requirement of MCP APIs is to be understood and used correctly by current gen AI agents.
yan5xu 11 hours ago
I built something in this space, bb-browser (https://github.com/epiral/bb-browser). Same CDP connection, but the approach is honestly kind of cheating.
Instead of giving agents browser primitives like snapshot, click, fill, I wrapped websites into CLI commands. It connects via CDP to a managed Chrome where you're already logged in, then runs small JS functions that call the site's own internal APIs. No headless browser, no stolen cookies, no API keys. Your browser is already the best place for fetch to happen. It has all the cookies, sessions, auth state. Traditional crawlers spend so much effort on login flows, CSRF tokens, CAPTCHAs, anti-bot detection... all of that just disappears when you fetch from inside the browser itself. Frontend engineers would probably hate me for this because it's really hard to defend against.
So instead of snapshot the DOM (easily 50K+ tokens), find element, click, snapshot again, parse... you just run
bb-browser site twitter/feed
Here's the thing I keep thinking about though. Operating websites through raw CDP is a genuinely hard problem. A model needs to understand page structure, find the right elements, handle dynamic loading, deal with SPAs. That takes a SOTA model. But calling a CLI command? Any model can do that. So the SOTA model only needs to run once, to write the adapter. After that, even a small open-source model runs "bb-browser site reddit/hot" just fine.
And not everyone even needs to write adapters themselves. I created a community repo, bb-sites (https://github.com/epiral/bb-sites), where people freely contribute adapters for different websites. So in a sense, someone with just an open-source model can already feel the real impact of agents in their daily workflow. Agents shouldn't be a privilege only for people who can access SOTA models and afford the token costs.
There's a guide command baked in so if you do want to add a new site, you can tell your agent "turn this website into a CLI" and it reverse-engineers the site's APIs and writes the adapter.
v0.8.x dropped the Chrome extension entirely. Pure CDP, managed Chrome instance. "npm install -g bb-browser" and it works.
netdur 20 hours ago
I wrote an ai agent that do chrome testing, yes, chrome MCP do work https://github.com/netdur/hugind/tree/main/agent/chrome_test...
tomcasaburi 11 hours ago
imo a much better setup is using playwright-cli + some skill.md files for profiling (for example, I have a skill using aidenybai/react-scan for frontend react profiling). token efficient, fast and more customizable/upgradable based on your workflow. vercel-labs/agent-browser is also a good alternative.
anesxvito 21 hours ago
Been using MCP tooling heavily for a few months and browser debugging integration is one of those things that sounds gimmicky until you actually try it. The real question is whether it handles flaky async state reliably or just hallucinates what it thinks the DOM looks like?
glerk a day ago
Note that this is a mega token guzzler in case you’re paying for your own tokens!
bartek_gdn 20 hours ago
My approach is a thin cli wrapper instead.
oldeucryptoboi a day ago
I tell Claude to use playwright so I don't even need to do the setup myself.
nomilk a day ago
Similarly, cursor has a built in browser and visit localhost to see the results in the browser. Although I don't use it much (I probably should).
pritesh1908 a day ago
I have been using Playwright for a fairly long time now. Do checkout
jedisct1 7 hours ago
For context extraction, Lightpanda is a really great option. Much faster than Chrome, and it comes with a built-in MCP server.
However, it will not fill forms, etc. But it can be combined with agent-browser to get the best of both worlds: https://swival.dev/pages/web-browsing.html
teaearlgraycold 20 hours ago
I love how in their demo video where they center an element it ends up off-center.
slrainka a day ago
chrome-cli with remote developer port has been working fine this entire time.
JKolios a day ago
Now that there's widespread direct connectivity between agents and browser sessions, are CAPTCHAs even relevant anymore?
wuxiaoxia88 10 hours ago
so good openclaw automation extensions, i like it.
wuxiaoxia88 10 hours ago
so good browser automation extensions. i like it
m00dy 16 hours ago
Connecting a remote VPS to a local Chrome session is usually a headache. It gets complicated when your Claw setup is on the server but the browser session stays on your own machine. I ended up using Proxybase’s relay [0] to bridge the gap, and it actually solved the connection issues for me.
holoduke 20 hours ago
One tip for the illegal scrapers or automators out there. Casperjs and phanthomjs are still working very well for anti bot detection. These are very old libs no longer maintained. But I can even scrape and authenticate at my banks.
Yokohiii a day ago
Was already eye rolling about the headline. Then I realized it's from chrome.
Hoping from some good stories from open claw users that permanently run debug sessions.
jerrygoyal 16 hours ago
It's from 2025. The post should have a year tag.
tomhow 15 hours ago
Done, thanks!