Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 107 posts

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

#51

Post by 101008 »

arjunchint wrote: post #8

Have 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…

This is very very important. It's completely unusable if this isn't solved. The agent could access a website that takes control of your machine.

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

#52

Post by elyase »

gregpr07 wrote: post #36
nostrebored wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I want to use browser-use in Cursor but I am using another option because it doesn't support MCP integration which is the common language they support for external tools

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

#53

Post by hakaneskici »

darepublic wrote: post #31

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

Could it be referring to the semantic correctness of HTML behind the scenes so AI can reasoned about the content structure? I think this is similar to a11y standards of assigning roles etc to UI elements, so non-AI agents like screen-readers can make sense of the contents.

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

#56

Post by shridharxp »

arjunchint wrote: post #38
gregpr07 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 withi…

Injecting JS into the page or controlling it using extension APIs is not a secure way to control the browser.

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

#57

Post by alex1115alex »

Awesome job launching guys! We used Browser Use last week to order burgers from our smart glasses:

https://x.com/caydengineer/status/1889835639316807980

One thing I'm hoping for is an increase in speed. Right now, the agent is slow for complex tasks, so we're still in an era where it might be better to codify popular tasks (eg: sending a WhatsApp message) instead of handling them with browser automation. Have yall looked into Groq / Cerberus?

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

#59

Post by agotterer »

I’m excited about the space and intend to keep an eye on you guys. I actually gave the opened source version of browser-use a try last week and ran into two problems:

The first, it refused to correctly load the browser tab and would get stuck in a loop trying. I was able to manually override this behavior for the purpose of prototyping.

The second, it hallucinated form input values. I provided it strict instructions on how to fill out a form and when it didn’t know what to do with an address field, it just wrote 123 Main St instead of not being able to complete the form.

The thing I really want and haven’t found in any of the browser agents I’ve tried, is a feedback loop. I don’t personally know what the final format looks like. But I want to know that what I expected to happen inside the browser, actually happened, and I want it to be verifiable. Otherwise I feel like I'm sending request into a black hole.

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

#60

Post by ec109685 »

ec109685 wrote: post #47
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?

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.

E.g. this puppeteer MCP: https://x.com/windsurf_ai/status/1894553166609617032
Post reply on HN