Show HN: Browser MCP – Automate your browser using Cursor, Claude, VS Code • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by knes » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 3:52 AM UTC

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

Also works flawlessly with augment code.com too!

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

#152

Post by aryehof » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 4:04 AM UTC

sdotdev wrote: post #97

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.

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

#153

Post by what » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 4:07 AM UTC

randunel wrote: post #59

xena wrote: post #57

Do you respect robots.txt so administrators can block this tool?

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?

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

#154

Post by throwaway314155 » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 4:11 AM UTC

taberiand wrote: post #150

throwaway314155 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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

#155

Post by iDon » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 4:18 AM UTC

mvdtnz wrote: post #116

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-... ).

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

#156

Post by darepublic » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 5:11 AM UTC

aryehof wrote: post #152

sdotdev wrote: post #97

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?

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

#157

Post by darepublic » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 5:19 AM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #20

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-G…

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).

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

#158

Post by wordofx » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 5:21 AM UTC

SSLy wrote: post #68

DeathArrow wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish people would stop using CF. It’s just making the internet worse.

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

#159

Post by Tepix » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 6:08 AM UTC

what wrote: post #141

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#160

Post by makingstuffs » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 6:40 AM UTC

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.