It's not every day that I catch tomorrow's huge hit today on a random HN post. Better get ready to quit your day job and get funded buddy, as my 30 years worth of tech instincts tell me this will take off vertically!
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MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation
51–60 of 200 posts
Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation
#52> If I asked you to build a table and gave you a Home Depot you probably would have a harder time than if I gave you a saw, a hammer and some nails. I doubt that, first and not least because Home Depot stocks lumber.
Home Depot also sells tables.
Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! Took a very quick look. It seems like the extension exposes tools for all domains that support mcp-b looking at DomainToolManager - does this mean if I have two tabs for a single domain you'll have duplicate tools per tab? Haven't had enough time to look through all the code there - interesting problem I guess since a single domain could have multiple accounts connected (ex: gmail w/ account 0 vs account 1 in…
No there is built in tool de-duping. I'm not sure how to handle domains with different url states though. Like you said there are some edge cases where two tabs of the same website expose different tool sets or have tools of the same name but would result in different outcomes when called. Curios if you have any thoughts on how to handle this
The user should be able to enable/disable tools or an entire tab’s toolset. Some keep open hundreds of tabs and that’s simply too many potential tools to expose. Deduping doesn’t make sense for the reasons you say, and that one logical task could lead to a series of operations missequenced across a range of tabs.
Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. Although I'd assume if the website owner went through the hassle of creating a MCP server for their website, they would probably want to be discovered
We mean if we could use this to instantiate an MCP for any website we're visiting.
Yea, I am planning a dev build of MCP-B which has access to user scripts apis. So technically you could `vibe code` and inject an MCP server into the target webpage
Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation
#55This MCP stuff is leading dev down the wrong path. We should be focusing on llms using self discovery to figure out information.
I had that opinion too.
You can ask an agent to browse a web page and click a button etc. They will work out how to use a browser automation library.
But it’s not worth the cost, time spent waiting or the inconsistency between implementations.
MCP just offloads that overload, much like how they can use bash tools when they are quite capable of writing an implementation of grep etc.
Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation
#56Not sure who the intended user is here? For frontend testing you actually do somewhat want the tests to break when the UI changes in major ways. And for other automation you'd be better off providing an actual API to use.
Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation
#57Ultimate test for me, make me a payment system where I put in $1 and it gives me $2 back
Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation
#58Could all of this be replaced simply by publishing OpenAPI (Swagger) spec and using universal swagger mcp client ???
This basically leaves up to the user to establish authenticated session manually.
Assuming claude is smart enough to pick up API key from prompt/config, and can use swagger based api client, wouldnt that be the same?
Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh no it's not done through that account. Seems to be some sort of ephemeral account scoped to the repo.
Re: MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation
#60Vite ...