A UI based on browser-use:
I've been following your progress for a while now and I'm super impressed how far you've got already.
Are you working on unifying the tools that the LLM uses with the MCP / model context protocol?
As far as I understand, lots of other providers (like Bolt/Stackblitz etc) are migrating towards this. Currently, there's not many tools available in the upstream specification other than File I/O and some minor interactions for system-use - but it would be pretty awesome if tools and services (like say, a website service) could be reflected there as it would save a lot of development overhead for the "LLM bindings".
Very interesting stuff you're building!
hmm, I though about this a lot. But tbh I think MCP is sort of a gimmick... probably the better way is for agents just to understand the http apis directly. Maybe I'm wrong, very happy to be convinced differently. Do you think MCP server for the cloud version would be useful?
MCP seems nicer than requiring LLM hosts execute arbitrary curl calls to endpoints since it packages a tool into a dedicated plugin that users can opt into.
strong agree with this -- I don't understand outside of integration with Claude Desktop why to use MCP rather than a dedicated API endpoint.
What’s your take - how can we expose Browser Use to as many use cases as possible? Is there easier way than openapi config?
Have you inspected or thought through the security of your open source library?
You are using debugger tools such as CDP, launching playwright without a sandbox, and guiding users to launch Chrome in debugger mode to connect to browser-use on their main browser.
The debugging tools you use have active exploits that Google doesn't fix because they are supposed to be for debugging and not for production/general use. This combined with your other two design choices let an exploit to escalate and infect their main machine.
Have you considered not using all these debugging permissions to productionize your service?
how would that work? Can you control the browser without debug mode? Especially in production the browsers are anyway running on single instance docker containers so the file system is not accesible... are there exploits that can do harm from a virtual machine?
Yes, I was able to figure out a secure way to control the browser with AI Agents at rtrvr.ai without using debugger permissions/tools so it is most definitely possible.
I meant by in production in the sense how you are advising your users to setup the local installation. Even if you launch browser use locally within a container but your restarting the user's Chrome in debug mode and controlling it with CDP from within the container, then the door is wide open to exploits and the container doesn't do anything?!
Embed a WebView instead of launching browser?
This looks very useful for web apps. We have a use case for legacy Windows apps. How feasible is this kind of technology for performing agentic workflows in legacy native apps?
Congrats on the launch!
I just about fell out of my chair laughing at your cloud hosted tier with the tagline "We have to eat somehow™" aka "please pay us"
I signed up for the paid tier and I'm hopeful this can help us integrate legacy CRM's with our company's unified communication sales tool.
Either way good luck!
How are you different from https://www.browserbase.com/ and their Stagehand framework? [0]
From the first glance, browser-use is compatible with more models, and has (much) more github stars ;)
Coincidentally I played with it over the last weekend using Gemini model. It's quite promising!
Yeah, we are much bigger and work on a higher level. stagehand work step by step, we are trying to make end to end web agents.
Does anyone have experience comparing this to Skyvern[0]? I originally thought the $30/month would be the killer feature, but it's only $30 worth of credits. Otherwise they both seem to have the same offering
I think our cloud is much simpler (just one prompt and go). But it's also sort of a different service. The main differences come from the open source side - we are essentially building more of a framework for anytime to use and they are just a web app.
What is your overall vision and roadmap about automated testing for web apps by bringing value from AI into the process? When I worked on the accessibilityinsights.io team, dealing with inconsistent or complicated xPaths was also an issue. Is AI vision helping there much?
How do you keep your service from being blocked on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn's API sucks. I run an analytics platform[0] that uses it and it only has 10% of what our customers are asking for. It'd be great to use browser-use, but in my experience, you run into all sort of issues with browser automation on LinkedIn.
If you run it locally, you can connect it to your real browser and user profile where you are already logged in. This works for me for LinkedIn automation, e.g., to send friend requests or answer messages.
A bigger problem on LinkedIn for us is all the nested UI elements and different scrolling elements. With some configuration in our extraction layer in buildDomTree.js and some custom actions, I believe someone could build a really cool LinkedIn agent.
Make a separate profile and launch that for the scrape. Don't have to gum up your primary profile
AI agents have lead to a big surge in scraping/crawling activity on the web, and many don't use proper user agents and don't stick to any scraping best practices that the industry has developed over the past two decades (robots.txt, rate limits). This comes with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported on HN.
Do you have any built-in features that address these issues?
Yes, some hosting services have experienced a 100%-1000% increase in hosting costs.
On most platforms, browser use only requires the interactive elements, which we extract, and does not need images or videos. We have not yet implemented this optimization, but it will reduce costs for both parties.
Our goal is to abstract backend functionality from webpages. We could cache this, and only update the cache if eTags change.
Websites that really don't want us will come up with audio captchas and new creative methods.
Agents are different from bots. Agents are intended as a direct user clone and could also bring revenue to websites.
>Websites that really don't want us will come up with audio captchas and new creative methods.
Which you or other AIs will then figure a way around. You literally mention "extract data behind login walls" as one of your use cases so it sounds like you just don't give a shit about the websites you are impacting.
It's like saying, "If you really don't want me to break into your house and rifle through your stuff, you should just buy a more expensive security system."
imo if the website doesn't want us there the long term value is anyway not great (maybe exception is SERP apis or sth which live exlusively because google search api is brutally expensive).
> extract data behind login walls
We mean this more from a perspective of companies wanting it, but there is a login wall. For example (actual customer) - "I am a compliance company that has system from 2001 and interacting with it really painful. Let's use Browser Use to use the search bar, download data and report back to me".
I believe in the long run agents will have to pay for the data from website providers, and then the incentives are once again aligned.
> imo if the website doesn't want us there the long term value is anyway not great
Wat? You're saying if a website doesn't want your scraping their data then that data has low long-term value? Or are you saying something else because that makes no fucking sense.
The title says make your website more accessible for agents... But then the quick start seemingly just acts from the agentic side to find a post on Reddit. So I didn't fully grok what this is about. My initial guess is you use agents on a website, allow them to think long, then come up with some selectors to speed up subsequent tries. But it's really not clear to me
Is it possible to mix browser-use with traditional DOM/XPath/CSS-selector automation? e.g. Have certain automation steps that are more fuzzy/AI like "click on the image of a cat"
We are experimenting with this. Currently the library api is very raw but technically possible (we introduced this notion of initial actions, which are just deterministic actions before the LLM kicks in) - https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/blob/main/example....
The other way to achieve this with Browser Use is to save the history from `history = agent.run()` and rerun it with `agent.rerun_history(history)`.
I'd love to see if this can of any use to you!
i tried the reddit quickstart example in the repo and it seemed to be incapable of completing the task.
hmm interesting - sometimes it definitely fails yes. Will take a look!
btw - our biggest challenge is exactly this, solving thousands of issues that arise on the fly.
fwiw, i had it do something _far_ more complex that i am currently dealing with at work and it performed perfectly in my few test cases. i see very heavy use of this tool in my future. just figured i'd give a shot about the quickstart not functioning as planned :)
> On the open-source side, browser use remains free. You can use any LLM, from Gemini to Sonnet, Qwen, or even DeepSeek-R1. It’s licensed under MIT, giving you full freedom to customize it.
As this project is MIT, that means companies like Amazon can deploy a managed version and can compete against you with prices going close to zero in their free-tier and with a higher quotas than what you are offering.
I predict that this project is likely going to change to AGPL or a new business license to combat against this.
pretty sick stuff guys, excited to see what you accomplish
Ha!
I just saw this win an AI Hackaton in Toronto but they said it was their own thing, quite dishonest. Everyone was rightfully impressed, me as well not gonna lie. I was a bit sus someone could come up with something like this in a weekend, but they were from U of Waterloo, Vector Institute and whatnot, so I said "maybe". Now I know they were just a bunch of scammers, sad.
Anyway, this is a great project, congratulations. It's so good it's making other people win already, lol. I have so many use cases for this. I truly wish you the best!
Edit: Downvote me all you want, if you love scammers so much I can send you their contact so you can "invest" in their trash. Lol.
For me, it simply demonstrates how easy and fast you can build these tools now. We have many fellow YC founders who build great products on top of browser-use. They don't have to quote us. I think it's awesome to enable so many new startup ideas.
Did they claim the project as their own, or did they use the open source to build a project?
They claimed the project as their own, with a title like "AI agents that do things for you".
One of the judges explicitly asked if they actually made this thing or was it something else like "a video" showing what it would be like.
One of the team members confidently replied it was real and that they made it all during the weekend.
It was a bit too good to be true.
Edit: I found a video of the thing. I initially posted it here but decided to delete it, the reason for that is I don't think they deserve to be publicly shamed. We were all having fun and they probably got a little carried away. If any of them sees this just don't do that next time. Play fair.
The audacity. Imagine if someone googled and exposed them.
Which hackathon?
Most hackathons are like that.
These guys are goated