One tip for the illegal scrapers or automators out there. Casperjs and phanthomjs are still working very well for anti bot detection. These are very old libs no longer maintained. But I can even scrape and authenticate at my banks.
Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
111–120 of 266 posts
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
you mean this one? https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser
It is 2 months old! My excuse for not keeping up is that I'm in so deep that Claude Code can predict the stock market. I'll still publish mine and see if has any value but agent browser looks very complete. Thank you for sharing!
Yes please, maybe there will be some solution that will fit the problem better! I recently released something similar, and because of the small API, I'm more comfortable using it.
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
MCP is very much not dead. centralized remote MCP servers are incredibly useful. also bespoke CLIs still require guidance for models to use effectively, so it's clear that token efficiency is still an issue regardless.
I see remote MCP servers as a great interface to consume api responses. The idea that you essentially make your apis easily available to agents to bring in relevant context is a powerful one. When folks say MCP is dead, I don't get it. What other alternatives exist in place of MCP? Arbitrary code via curl/sdks to call a remote endpoint?
> What other alternatives exist in place of MCP? Arbitrary code via curl/sdks to call a remote endpoint?
cli?
for example aws cli. It's a full interface to aws API. Why would you need mcp for that?
and if you have any doubts, agents use it with a great effect even without any relevant skill. "aws help" is fully discoverable.
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#114Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful. So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it. Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic coding know. Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more flexible and many are already trained in. Playwright with headless Chromium or headed chrome is…
> So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it.
I use it extensively, many of my colleagues do. I get a ton of value out of it. Some prefer Antigravity, but I prefer Gemini CLI. I get fairly long trajectories out of it, and some of my colleagues are getting day-long trajectories out of it. It has improved massively since I started using it when it first came out.
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. CLI. Always CLI. Never MCP. Ever. You’re welcome.
That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead.
Can't we just iteratively inspect the network traces then? We don't need to consume the whole 2mb of data, maybe just dump the network trace and use jq to get the fields to keep the context minimal. I haven't added this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790 , but I feel it would be a good addition. Then prompt it with instructions to gradually discover the necessary data.
But then I wonder, where the balance is between a bunch of small tool calls, vs one larger one.
I recall some recent discussion here on hn on big data analysis
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#116I don’t do any serious web development and haven’t for 25 years aside from recently vibe coding internal web admin portals for back end cloud + app dev projects. But I did recently have to implement a web crawler for a customer’s site for a RAG project using Chromium + Playwrite in a Docker container deployed to Lambda. I ran the Docker container locally for testing. Could a web developer test using Claude + Chromium…
Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#117I use Playwright to intercept all requests and responses and have Claude Code navigate to a website like YouTube and click and interact with all the elements and inputs while recording all the requests and responses associated with each interaction. Then it creates a detailed strongly typed API to interact with any website using the underlying API. Yes, I know it likely breaks everybody's terms of service but at the…
Please do!
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#118Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful. So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it. Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic coding know. Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more flexible and many are already trained in. Playwright with headless Chromium or headed chrome is…
I know it’s a bit of a tangent but man you’re right re. Gemini CLI. It’s woefully bad, barely works. Maybe because I was a “free” user trying it out at the time, but it was such a bad experience it turned me off subscribing to whatever their coding plan is called today.
I had this exp too, but I trialed the pro sub a few weeks back and it has been great. I have no complaints this time
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#119I suggest to use https://github.com/simonw/rodney instead
Unfortunately there are like a billion competitors to this right now (including Playwright MCP, Playwright CLI, the new baked-in Playwright feature in Codex /experimental, Claude Code for Chrome...) and I can never quite decide if or when I should try to switch. I'm still just using the ordinary Playwright MCP server in both Codex and Claude Code, for the time being.
I would use whatever you are comfortable with, I wanted a similar tool so I coded my own. Smaller API so that understand what is going on and it is easy not to get lost
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#120I love how in their demo video where they center an element it ends up off-center.