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MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

mcp-b.ai

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Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

#41

Post by ethanniser »

miguelspizza wrote: post #38
ethanniser wrote: post #36

this is super cool wonder if it was inspired by `broadcast-mcp` [1] (hackathon project by me and a friend from may based on the same concept but not fleshed out) 1: https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/1923956444153643443

Ah no, first time seeing this. How were you interacting with the website server? Via extension or some way else?

we would open the mcp site in a new tab or iframe then had a custom mcp transport based on `window.postMessage` just like you do https://github.com/RhysSullivan/broadcast-mcp/blob/main/pack...

this concept is awesome- glad someone really fleshed it out

Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

#42

Post by sbarre »

muratsu wrote: post #35
rapind wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the practical way. The website owner (or rather the builder, since if you're running wordpress, we can assume MCP will be part of the package) is already responsible for the human interface across many devices, and also the search engine interface (robots.txt, sitemap.xml, metatags). Having a standard we can use to curate what the AI sees and how it can interact would be hugely beneficial. There's spa…

I agree with you that platforms like wordpress, shopify etc will likely ship MCP extensions to help with various use cases. Accompanied with a discovery standard similar to llms.txt, I think it will be beneficial too. My only argument is that platforms like this are also the most "templated" designs and it's already easy for AI to navigate them (since dom structure variance is small). The bigger challenge I think is…

> it's already easy for AI to navigate them (since dom structure variance is small).

The premise of MCP-B is that it's in fact not easy to reliably navigate websites today with LLMs, if you're just relying on DOM traversal or computer vision.

And when it comes to authenticated and read/write operations, I think you need the reliability and control that comes from something like MCP-B, rather than just trusting the LLM to figure it out.

Both Wordpress and Shopify allow users to heavily customize their front-end, and therefore ship garbage HTML + CSS if they choose to (or don't know any better). I certainly wouldn't want to rely on LLMs parsing arbitrary HTML if I'm trying to automate a purchase or some other activity that involves trust and/or sensitive data.

Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

#43

Post by mhio »

miguelspizza wrote: post #7
orliesaurus wrote: post #6

I don't get it from the homepage, feels like Selenium on the browser, since you built it can you explain ?

Similar but also very different. Playwright and Selenium are browser automation frameworks. There is a Playwright-MCP server which let's your agent use Playwright for browser automation. MCP-B is a different approach. Website owners create MCP servers `inside` their websites, and MCP-B clients are either injected by browser extensions or included in the websites JS. Instead of visual parsing like Playwright, you get…

A playright-mcp server, or any bidi browser automation, should be equally capable of discovering/injecting and calling the same client JS exposed MCP-B site API?

It's like an OpenAPI definition but for JS/MCP? (outside of the extension to interact with that definition)

Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

#44

Post by consumer451 »

handfuloflight wrote: post #39
consumer451 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude's contributions graph is interesting. What is going on here? Does Claude Code commit as itself sometimes, but extremely rarely? I don't understand. https://github.com/claude

If you ask it to commit it'll sign itself as the author.

But then, how are there so few commits in its profile graph? I suppose I may be admitting my ignorance of how public GitHub works, but still curious.

Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

#45

Post by byteknight »

gubicle wrote: post #31
fzysingularity wrote: post #15

The contributions for the Github project is quite intriguing: https://github.com/MiguelsPizza/WebMCP/graphs/contributors MiguelsPizza | 3 commits | 89++ | 410-- claude | 2 commits | 31,799++ | 0--

That doesn't look right... if you look at the actual commits, they are all from MiguelsPizza / Alex Nahas https://github.com/MiguelsPizza/WebMCP/commits/main/

He rewrote history to hide it?

He admits it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44516104

Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

#46

Post by TechDebtDevin »

miguelspizza wrote: post #23
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #16

hmm, I have an MCP route, that fetches the page in a browser, returns and lets the LLM inject javascript onto the page to return whatever structured output it desires..Or whatever (kinda scarily). How is this different? --Shoutout to Go-Rod https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-rod/rod@v0.116.2#Page

Cool, I'll check it out! I'll need to look a bit more, but at a glance, MCP-B is more putting the onus of browser automation (i.e. how the agent will interact with the web page) on the website owner. They get to expose exactly the functionality they want to the agent

Oh this is for the website owner. Yeah, mine is to make an arbitrary site interactable with an LLM. It can choose to get a map of the DOM/screenshot/extract by xml path/ and interact via a few different methods. But the PageEval() method from GO rod works pretty well

Would like to just provide a runtime for an LLM to solve captchas.

My main focus is (anti) bot detection.

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