41–50 of 53 posts
Why not a browser extension?
A browser extension would have to run on individual/personal browser; we're focused on providing infrastructure to run hundreds of browsers that you can connect to with code -- whether for automation or information retrieval. Curious, what made you think browser extension first? :)
It would be cheaper (free?) and easier to maintain, one could even use the chatgpt.com or claude.ai web app as API.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We love Puppeteer and use it to power our API! We don't compete with Puppeteer/Playwright/Selenium but we're focused on solving the problem of hosting Chromium browsers in the cloud. The workflow jump we've seen ourselves and from customers is that it's pretty straightforward to build these scripts locally, but the moment you want to run them in prod, you now need to deal with a ton of overhead around packaging up to…
I can relate to this exact experience and I think anybody who's tried to bring scraping to prod can as well!
Happy to see there's a way to get browser automation for AI without building infrastructure to support it. Yet I don't see examples of connecting an LLM to drive a web session, just examples of using Puppeteer or Playwright or Selenium to drive a web session. Presumably your user base knows how to write custom code for an interface between Claude or OpenAI API and Puppeteer/Playwright/Selenium. Sadly, I don't know ho…
We also have more AI-specific examples, tutorials, and an MCP server coming out really soon (like really soon).
You can keep an eye out on our releases on discord/twitter where we'll be posting a bunch of these example repos.
Browser as a service I understand, but what is the "for AI agents" part?
It does just so happen that it ends up being useful for non AI apps as well
Hello Hacker News! We’re Nas and Huss, co-founders of steel.dev ( http://steel.dev ). Steel is an open-source browser API for AI agents and apps. We make it easy for AI devs to build browser automation into their products without getting flagged as a bot or worrying about browser infra. over the last year or so, we’ve built quite a few AI apps that interact with the web and noticed - a. it was magical when you could…
Would love to read an engineering blog about your journey from trying to run this on Kubernetes and ending up on Firecracker VM.
Is there any AI out there that can detect and fill in WiFi login pages typically found on hotel and company guest networks?
If it's a login page that gets redirected to when you try to access a page on your browser, then theoretically you should be able to do that with the open source repo and custom AI logic.
Having to constantly fill out those login pages (especially for networks that expire) is such a pain so would love to use this myself lol
Can this defeat perimeterX used by Zillow?
We'll probably take a deeper look at this in the next few weeks and expand on what we work with vs what we don't.
Can you say more about your product plans? It looks like this is directly competing with Browserbase — how will you differentiate? Looking forward to seeing how the product and company grows
beautiful docs + api ref! what are you using? (cool that you're doing open-source browserbase also, excited to check this out)
theyre using scalar :) https://scalar.com https://github.com/scalar/scalar (disclaimer: im the co-founder & ceo of scalar)
Very interesting. I worry that if I use your cloud, and a lot of other people do, all of your IP addresses will get banned by all the big players. It will definitely be a fun cat and mouse game! Related story: Way back in the day, PayPal was just getting started, and decided eBay transactions would be their perfect customer. The only problem is that eBay didn't allow scraping. So they built an entire proxy infrastruc…