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Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)

developer.chrome.com

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Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)

#71

Post by cheema33 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #65
mmaunder wrote: post #41

Earlier 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.

> That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead.

The problem with MCP is that you are paying the price in token usage, even if you are not using the MCP server. Why would anybody want that?

And no, the tool search function recently introduced by Anthropic does not completely solve this problem.

Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)

#74

Post by Torn »

cheema33 wrote: post #72

How does this compare with playwright CLI? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli

I personally found playwright-cli, and agent-browser which wraps playwright, both more token-efficient than using the raw mcp.

Odd that this article from Dec 2025 has been posted to the top of HN though

Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)

#75

Post by Torn »

tonyhschu wrote: post #26

Very cool. I do something like this but with Playwright. It used to be a real token hog though, and got expensive fast. So much so that I built a wrapper to dump results to disk first then let the agent query instead. https://uisnap.dev/ Will check this out to see if they’ve solved the token burn problem.

Mostly, yes: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli

Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)

#78

Post by Johnny_Bonk »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #43

I 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…

Yes, please do and ping me when it's done lol. Did you make it into an agent skill?

Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)

#79

Post by abhis3798 »

rsalus wrote: post #56
mmaunder wrote: post #40

Google 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…

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?

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