Show HN: Browser MCP – Automate your browser using Cursor, Claude, VS Code

Posted by namukang 4/7/2025

Show HN: Browser MCP – Automate your browser using Cursor, Claude, VS Code(browsermcp.io)

616 points | 217 commentspage 4

rahimnathwani 4/7/2025|

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?

namukang 4/7/2025||

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.

hannofcart 4/7/2025||

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.'

tylergetsay 4/7/2025||

I don't think remote debugging by itself on a normal chrome profile is detectable

omneity 4/7/2025|||

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.

redblacktree 4/7/2025||

You're talking about exposing Chrome CDP to the wider internet, right? Or are you highlighting these dangers in the local context?

omneity 4/7/2025||

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.

parhamn 4/7/2025|||

I'm sure its about the cookies/sessions but I do recall you can load cookies from another browser?

101008 4/7/2025||

Good, just what we needed. More bots browsing the internet. Somedays I think I am not 100% against of every website having a captcha...

handfuloflight 4/7/2025||

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.

101008 4/7/2025||

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?

brandensilva 4/7/2025||

Yeah this is definitely a bad English bot

mgraczyk 4/7/2025||

It's a developer tool

101008 4/7/2025||

Then it should be limited to localhost or something similar.

mgraczyk 4/7/2025|||

It can be, just do that when you install it

dalemhurley 4/7/2025|||

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?

knes 4/8/2025||

This is great. Especially debugging frontend issue on localhost or staging.

Also works flawlessly with augment code.com too!

picardo 4/7/2025||

I like this. It would be interesting to use it for when I need to use authenticated browser sessions.

lxe 4/7/2025||

This one also uses aria snapshots formatted as yaml. This will quickly exceed context limits.

plessas 4/10/2025||

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.

jngiam1 4/7/2025||

Pretty cool, do you know of a version of this that supports the new remote MCP protocol

omneity 4/7/2025|

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

revskill 4/7/2025||

Can u expose the sdk as a react component to be used inside an app ?

mvdtnz 4/7/2025||

Is anyone successfully running MCPs / Claude Desktop on Linux?

iDon 4/8/2025|

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-... ).

pknerd 4/7/2025|

So why do I need an editor(Cusror)? How does a non-coder use it?

rahimnathwani 4/7/2025|

If you're a non-coder, use it with Claude Desktop.

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