The title says make your website more accessible for agents... But then the quick start seemingly just acts from the agentic side to find a post on Reddit. So I didn't fully grok what this is about. My initial guess is you use agents on a website, allow them to think long, then come up with some selectors to speed up subsequent tries. But it's really not clear to me
Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
31–40 of 107 posts
Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, some hosting services have experienced a 100%-1000% increase in hosting costs. On most platforms, browser use only requires the interactive elements, which we extract, and does not need images or videos. We have not yet implemented this optimization, but it will reduce costs for both parties. Our goal is to abstract backend functionality from webpages. We could cache this, and only update the cache if eTags chan…
>Websites that really don't want us will come up with audio captchas and new creative methods. Which you or other AIs will then figure a way around. You literally mention "extract data behind login walls" as one of your use cases so it sounds like you just don't give a shit about the websites you are impacting. It's like saying, "If you really don't want me to break into your house and rifle through your stuff, you s…
imo if the website doesn't want us there the long term value is anyway not great (maybe exception is SERP apis or sth which live exlusively because google search api is brutally expensive).
> extract data behind login walls
We mean this more from a perspective of companies wanting it, but there is a login wall. For example (actual customer) - "I am a compliance company that has system from 2001 and interacting with it really painful. Let's use Browser Use to use the search bar, download data and report back to me".
I believe in the long run agents will have to pay for the data from website providers, and then the incentives are once again aligned.
Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Websites that really don't want us will come up with audio captchas and new creative methods. Which you or other AIs will then figure a way around. You literally mention "extract data behind login walls" as one of your use cases so it sounds like you just don't give a shit about the websites you are impacting. It's like saying, "If you really don't want me to break into your house and rifle through your stuff, you s…
imo if the website doesn't want us there the long term value is anyway not great (maybe exception is SERP apis or sth which live exlusively because google search api is brutally expensive). > extract data behind login walls We mean this more from a perspective of companies wanting it, but there is a login wall. For example (actual customer) - "I am a compliance company that has system from 2001 and interacting with i…
> imo if the website doesn't want us there the long term value is anyway not great
Wat? You're saying if a website doesn't want your scraping their data then that data has low long-term value? Or are you saying something else because that makes no fucking sense.
Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
#34How do you keep your service from being blocked on LinkedIn? LinkedIn's API sucks. I run an analytics platform[0] that uses it and it only has 10% of what our customers are asking for. It'd be great to use browser-use, but in my experience, you run into all sort of issues with browser automation on LinkedIn. 0 - https://www.definite.app/
If you run it locally, you can connect it to your real browser and user profile where you are already logged in. This works for me for LinkedIn automation, e.g., to send friend requests or answer messages. A bigger problem on LinkedIn for us is all the nested UI elements and different scrolling elements. With some configuration in our extraction layer in buildDomTree.js and some custom actions, I believe someone coul…
Make a separate profile and launch that for the scrape. Don't have to gum up your primary profile
Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
#35Have you inspected or thought through the security of your open source library? You are using debugger tools such as CDP, launching playwright without a sandbox, and guiding users to launch Chrome in debugger mode to connect to browser-use on their main browser. The debugging tools you use have active exploits that Google doesn't fix because they are supposed to be for debugging and not for production/general use. Th…
how would that work? Can you control the browser without debug mode? Especially in production the browsers are anyway running on single instance docker containers so the file system is not accesible... are there exploits that can do harm from a virtual machine?
Embed a WebView instead of launching browser?
Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
hmm, I though about this a lot. But tbh I think MCP is sort of a gimmick... probably the better way is for agents just to understand the http apis directly. Maybe I'm wrong, very happy to be convinced differently. Do you think MCP server for the cloud version would be useful?
strong agree with this -- I don't understand outside of integration with Claude Desktop why to use MCP rather than a dedicated API endpoint.
What’s your take - how can we expose Browser Use to as many use cases as possible? Is there easier way than openapi config?
Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
#37pretty sick stuff guys, excited to see what you accomplish
Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
#38Have you inspected or thought through the security of your open source library? You are using debugger tools such as CDP, launching playwright without a sandbox, and guiding users to launch Chrome in debugger mode to connect to browser-use on their main browser. The debugging tools you use have active exploits that Google doesn't fix because they are supposed to be for debugging and not for production/general use. Th…
how would that work? Can you control the browser without debug mode? Especially in production the browsers are anyway running on single instance docker containers so the file system is not accesible... are there exploits that can do harm from a virtual machine?
Yes, I was able to figure out a secure way to control the browser with AI Agents at rtrvr.ai without using debugger permissions/tools so it is most definitely possible.
I meant by in production in the sense how you are advising your users to setup the local installation. Even if you launch browser use locally within a container but your restarting the user's Chrome in debug mode and controlling it with CDP from within the container, then the door is wide open to exploits and the container doesn't do anything?!
Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
#39i tried the reddit quickstart example in the repo and it seemed to be incapable of completing the task.
Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
#40i tried the reddit quickstart example in the repo and it seemed to be incapable of completing the task. https://pastebin.com/PnLnQ3kY
hmm interesting - sometimes it definitely fails yes. Will take a look!
btw - our biggest challenge is exactly this, solving thousands of issues that arise on the fly.