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

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

#81

Post by mkummer »

otherayden wrote: post #72
thenaturalist wrote: post #66

Crazy, in looking up some info on the web and creating a Spreadsheet on Google Sheets to insert the results, it worked almost perfectly the first time and completely failed subsequently on 8-10 different tries. Is there an issue with the lag between what is happening in the browser and the MCP app (in my case Claude Desktop)? I have a feeling the first time I tried it, I was fast enough clicking the "Allow for this c…

Such a rich UI like google sheets seems like a bad use case for such a general "browser automation" MCP server. Would be cool to see an MCP server like this, but with specific tools that let the LLM read and write to google sheets cells. I'm sure it would knock these tasks out of the park if it had a more specific abstraction instead of generally interacting with a webpage

Agreed, I'd been working on a Google Sheets specific MCP last week – just got it published here: https://github.com/mkummer225/google-sheets-mcp

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

ndr wrote: post #61

WARNING for Cursor users: Cursor is currently stuck using an outdated snapshot of the VSCode Marketplace, meaning several extensions within Cursor remain affected by high-severity CVEs that have already been patched upstream in VSCode. As a result, Cursor users unknowingly remain vulnerable to known security issues. This issue has been acknowledged but remains unresolved: https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/16…

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by SkyBelow »

bhouston wrote: post #44

So the website claims: "Avoids bot detection and CAPTCHAs by using your real browser fingerprint." Yeah, not really. I've used a similar system a few weeks back (one I wrote myself), having AI control my browser using my logged in session, and I started to get Captcha's during my human sessions in the browser and eventually I got blocked from a bunch of websites. Now that I've stopped using my browser session in that…

What do you think they might be looking for that could be detected pretty quickly? I'm wondering if it is something like they can track mouse movement and calculate when a mouse is moving too cleanly, so adding some more human like noise to the mouse movement can better bypass the system. Others have mentioned doing too many actions too fast, but what about potential timing between actions. Even if every click isn't that fast, if they have a very consistent delay that would be another non-human sign.

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

#84

Post by tempoponet »

SkyBelow wrote: post #83
bhouston wrote: post #44

So the website claims: "Avoids bot detection and CAPTCHAs by using your real browser fingerprint." Yeah, not really. I've used a similar system a few weeks back (one I wrote myself), having AI control my browser using my logged in session, and I started to get Captcha's during my human sessions in the browser and eventually I got blocked from a bunch of websites. Now that I've stopped using my browser session in that…

What do you think they might be looking for that could be detected pretty quickly? I'm wondering if it is something like they can track mouse movement and calculate when a mouse is moving too cleanly, so adding some more human like noise to the mouse movement can better bypass the system. Others have mentioned doing too many actions too fast, but what about potential timing between actions. Even if every click isn't…

Modern captchas use a number of tools including many of the approaches you mentioned. This why you might sometimes see a CloudFlare "I am not a robot" checkbox that checks itself and moves along before you have much time to even react. It's looking at a number of signals to determine that you're probably human before you've even checked the box.

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

#85

Post by andy_ppp »

When I go to a shopping website I want to be able to tell my browser "hey please go through all the sideboards on this list and filter out for the ones that are larger than 155cm and smaller than 100cm, prioritise the ones with dark wood and space for vinyl records which are 31.43cm tall" for example.

Is there any browser that can do this yet as it seems extremely useful to be able to extract details from the page!

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

#86

Post by PantaloonFlames »

JackYoustra wrote: post #80
PantaloonFlames wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems the benefit of MCP is for Anthropic to enlist the community in building integrations for Claude desktop, no? And if other vendors sign on to support MCP, then it becomes a self reinforcing cycle of adoption.

MCP is useful because anthropic has a disproportionate share of API traffic relative to its valuation and a tiny share of first-party client traffic. The best way around this is to shift as much traffic to API as possible.

First party client , meaning browser? User agent or … Electron app, or , any mobile app?

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

#87

Post by redblacktree »

omneity wrote: post #55
tylergetsay wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

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

#88

Post by michaelbuckbee »

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 use Vimium (Chrome extension for using keyboard control of the browser) and this happens to me as well since the behavior looks "unnatural".

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

#90

Post by spmurrayzzz »

PantaloonFlames wrote: post #78
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just view it as a relative minor convenience, but it's not some game-changer IMO. The tool use / function calling thing far predates Anthropic releasing the MCP specification and it really wasn't that onerous to do before either. You could provide a json schema spec and tell the model to generate compliant json to pass to the API in question. MCP doesn't inherently solve any of the problems that come up in that sor…

It seems the benefit of MCP is for Anthropic to enlist the community in building integrations for Claude desktop, no? And if other vendors sign on to support MCP, then it becomes a self reinforcing cycle of adoption.

Yea it certainly does benefit Claude Desktop to some degree, but most MCP servers are a few hundred SLOC and the protocol schema itself is only ~400 SLOC. If that was the only major obstacle standing in the way of adoption, I'd be very surprised.

Coupled with the fact that any LLM trained for tool use can utilize the protocol, it doesn't feel like much of a moat that uniquely positions Claude Desktop in a meaningful way.

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