Live data from Hacker News

MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

mcp-b.ai

61–70 of 200 posts

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

#61
From the blog post:

"The Auth problem At this point, the auth issues with MCP are well known. OAuth2.1 is great, but we are basically trying to re-invent auth for agents that act on behalf of the user. This is a good long term goal, but we are quickly realizing that LLM sessions with no distinguishable credentials of their own are difficult to authorize and will require a complete re-imagining of our authorization systems. Data leakage in multi-tenant apps that have MCP servers is just not a solved problem yet.

I think a very strong case for MCP is to limit the amount of damage the model can do and the amount of data it will ever have access to. The nice thing about client side APIs in multi-tenant apps is they are hopefully already scoped to the user. If we just give the model access to that, there's not much damage they can do.

It's also worth mentioning that OAuth2.1 is basically incompatible with internal Auth at Amazon (where I work). I won't go to much into this, but the implications of this reach beyond Amazon internal."

1. Oauth is not working in Amazon ==> need solution.

2. Oauth are difficult to authorize

3. limit the amount of damage the model can do WHILE "ulti-tenant apps is they are hopefully already scoped to the user".

I feel from a security side there is an issue here in this logic.

Oauth for apps can be far more tuned than current web user permission as usually, user have modification permission, that you may not want to provide.

Oauth not implemented in Amazon, is not really an issue.

Also this means you backdoor the App with another APP you establish trust with it. ==> This is a major no go for security as all actions on MCP app will be logged in the same scope as USER access.

You might just copy your session ID/ Cookie and do the same with an MCP.

I may be wrong the idea seem intersting but from a security side, I feel it's a bypass that will have a lot of issues with compliance.

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

#62

Earlier 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.

I was guessing Anthropic asked them to turn it off. Though why not also ask to delete the old activity of the person you bought the account from?

Like: https://github.com/fotinakis/swagger-blocks/issues/3

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

#64

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--

You’re going to see this pattern a lot more in the future.

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

#65
post #58

Could 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?

Do it.

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

#66

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…

what do you mean by "visual parsing like Playwright"? I'm pretty sure Playwright queries the DOM via js, there isn't inherently any visual parsing. Do you just mean that mcp-b has dedicated js APIs for each website? Your example is also pretty confusing, it looks like the website itself offers an "Increment by x" "tool" and then your first command to the website is to "subtract two from the count". So the AI model has to still understand the mcp tools offered by the website quite loosely and just calls them as needed? I suppose this is basically like using playwright except it doesn't have to parse the DOM (although it probably still does, I mean how else will it know that the "Increment by X" tool offered is in any way connected to the "count" you mention in your vague prompt. And then the additional benefit is that it can call a js function instead of having to generate the DOM/js playwright calls to do it.

I mean all this MCP stuff certainly seems useful even though this example isn't so good, the bigger uses will be when larger APIs and interactions are offered by the website like "Make a purchase" or "sort a table" and the AI would have to implement very complex set of DOM operations and XHR requests to make that happen and instead of flailing to do that, it can call an MCP tool which is just a js function.

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

#69

Earlier 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.

git require name and email to commit, but there's no cryptography involved there. Maybe GitHub won't green the lawn for unverified third party commits included in pushed commits?

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

#70

This MCP stuff is leading dev down the wrong path. We should be focusing on llms using self discovery to figure out information.

    We should be focusing on llms using self discovery to figure out information.
Can you expand? What does that mean, and why is the right (or better) path
Post reply on HN