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

81–90 of 107 posts

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

#81

Post by rvz »

MagMueller wrote: post #78
rvz wrote: post #42

> 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 th…

Have you seen in the past that Amazon did that against other projects?

Previous well known victims include: Elasticsearch, MongoDB and Redis.

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

#83

Post by jerpint »

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…

If they’re launching a cloud-based service, doesn’t this effectively remove the risk of running it locally ?

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

#84

Post by rainforest »

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…

Could you go into a bit more detail about this? Why is exposing devtools to the agent a problem? What's the attack vector? That the agent might do something malicious to exfil saved passwords?

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

#86

Post by mohsen1 »

jerpint wrote: post #83
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…

If they’re launching a cloud-based service, doesn’t this effectively remove the risk of running it locally ?

Cross origin is still a problem when those settings are off

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

#87

Post by xena »

gregpr07 wrote: post #66
erellsworth wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Haha no, I am saying that if websites don’t want you there they will find a way to block you in the long run, so betting the product on extracting data from those websites is a bad business model (probably)

It would be really nice if you made some easy way for administrators to tell that a client is using browser use so they can administratively block that tool. I mean, unless you want to pay for the infrastructure improvements to the websites your product is assaulting.

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

#88

Post by TingPing »

lostmsu wrote: post #35
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?

Embed a WebView instead of launching browser?

I don’t know what problems they wanted to solve but one issue is browsers are trusted, views are not, so you have to workaround fingerprinting.

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

#89

Post by echelon »

Gregor and Magnus, the only thing I want in the world is an agent that removes all of the bad from the web:

- No more ads. No more banner ads. No more Google search ads. No more promoted stories. No more submarine ads.

- No more spam. Low quality content is nuked.

- No more clickbait. Inauthentic headlines from dubious sources are removed.

- No more rage comments. Angry commenters are muted. I have enough to worry about in my day.

- No more low-information comments. All the "Same." and "Nice." and low informational comments are removed to help me focus.

An agent of the future is there to preserve my precious time and attention. It will safeguard it to a level never before seen, even if it threatens the very business model the internet's consumer tools are based on. You work for me. You help me. Google, Reddit, et al. are adversarial relationships.

In the future, advertisers pay me for the privilege of pitching me. No ad reaches me without my consent or payment.

Please fix the internet. We've waited thirty years for this.

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

#90

Post by p0deje »

Have you experimented with using text-only models and DOM/accessibility tree for interaction with a ? I'm currently working on the open-source test automation tool (https://alumnium.ai) and the accessibility tree w/o screenshots works pretty well as long as the website provides decent support for ARIA attributes or at least has proper HTML5 structure.
Post reply on HN