Chrome DevTools MCP - Hacker News

Posted by xnx 6 hours ago

Chrome DevTools MCP(developer.chrome.com)

259 points | 123 commentspage 2

cheema33 3 hours ago|

How does this compare with playwright CLI?

https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli

Torn 3 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

EGreg 3 hours ago||

It’s made by Google and comes with Chrome

bartek_gdn 2 hours ago||

My approach is a thin cli wrapper instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790

anesxvito 3 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?

rossvc 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 3 hours ago|||

https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli and https://agent-browser.dev/

DimitriBouriez 3 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 4 hours ago||

Yes. CLI. Always CLI. Never MCP. Ever. You’re welcome.

nerdsniper 3 hours ago||

That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead.

bartek_gdn 2 hours ago|||

Can't we just iteratively inspect the network traces then? We don't need to consume the whole 2mb of data, maybe just dump the network trace and use jq to get the fields to keep the context minimal. I haven't added this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790 , but I feel it would be a good addition. Then prompt it with instructions to gradually discover the necessary data.

But then I wonder, where the balance is between a bunch of small tool calls, vs one larger one.

I recall some recent discussion here on hn on big data analysis

cheema33 3 hours ago|||

> That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead.

The problem with MCP is that you are paying the price in token usage, even if you are not using the MCP server. Why would anybody want that?

And no, the tool search function recently introduced by Anthropic does not completely solve this problem.

senand 4 hours ago||

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

meowface 4 hours 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 2 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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790

raw_anon_1111 4 hours 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 1 hour 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 2 hours ago||

Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790

NiekvdMaas 5 hours ago||

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

silverwind 3 hours ago||

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

speedgoose 5 hours ago||

Interesting. MCP APIs can be useful for humans too.

Chrome's dev tools already had an API [1], but perhaps the new MCP one is more user friendly, as one main requirement of MCP APIs is to be understood and used correctly by current gen AI agents.

[1]: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/

teaearlgraycold 2 hours ago|

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

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