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Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents

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Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents

#41

Post by dogman123 »

gregpr07 wrote: post #40
dogman123 wrote: post #39

i 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.

fwiw, i had it do something _far_ more complex that i am currently dealing with at work and it performed perfectly in my few test cases. i see very heavy use of this tool in my future. just figured i'd give a shot about the quickstart not functioning as planned :)

Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents

#42

Post by rvz »

> On the open-source side, browser use remains free. You can use any LLM, from Gemini to Sonnet, Qwen, or even DeepSeek-R1. It’s licensed under MIT, giving you full freedom to customize it.

As this project is MIT, that means companies like Amazon can deploy a managed version and can compete against you with prices going close to zero in their free-tier and with a higher quotas than what you are offering.

I predict that this project is likely going to change to AGPL or a new business license to combat against this.

Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents

#43

Post by [deleted] »

moralestapia wrote: post #7

Ha! I just saw this win an AI Hackaton in Toronto but they said it was their own thing, quite dishonest. Everyone was rightfully impressed, me as well not gonna lie. I was a bit sus someone could come up with something like this in a weekend, but they were from U of Waterloo, Vector Institute and whatnot, so I said "maybe". Now I know they were just a bunch of scammers, sad. Anyway, this is a great project, congratul…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents

#44

Post by hakaneskici »

What is your overall vision and roadmap about automated testing for web apps by bringing value from AI into the process? When I worked on the accessibilityinsights.io team, dealing with inconsistent or complicated xPaths was also an issue. Is AI vision helping there much?

Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents

#45

Post by djyaz1200 »

Congrats on the launch!

I just about fell out of my chair laughing at your cloud hosted tier with the tagline "We have to eat somehow™" aka "please pay us"

I signed up for the paid tier and I'm hopeful this can help us integrate legacy CRM's with our company's unified communication sales tool.

Either way good luck!

Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents

#47

Post by ec109685 »

gregpr07 wrote: post #26
cookiengineer wrote: post #10

I've been following your progress for a while now and I'm super impressed how far you've got already. Are you working on unifying the tools that the LLM uses with the MCP / model context protocol? As far as I understand, lots of other providers (like Bolt/Stackblitz etc) are migrating towards this. Currently, there's not many tools available in the upstream specification other than File I/O and some minor interaction…

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?

MCP seems nicer than requiring LLM hosts execute arbitrary curl calls to endpoints since it packages a tool into a dedicated plugin that users can opt into.

Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents

#49

Post by cadamsdotcom »

throw03172019 wrote: post #46

This looks very useful for web apps. We have a use case for legacy Windows apps. How feasible is this kind of technology for performing agentic workflows in legacy native apps?

What about OmniParser ? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/articles/omniparser...

Re: Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents

#50

Post by fallinditch »

nostrebored wrote: post #30
gregpr07 wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

I believe MCP helps here because it standardizes integrations, enhances user control via opt-in plugins, and improves security by avoiding direct endpoint calls.

@gregpr07 wouldn't adoption of MCP open up Browser-use to more use cases?

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