Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

1–10 of 107 posts

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

#1
Hey HN, we’re Gregor and Magnus, the founders of browser-use (https://browser-use.com/), an easy way to connect AI agents with the browser. Our agent library is open-source (https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use) and we have what is the biggest open-source community for browser agents. And now we have a cloud offering—hence our Launch HN today!

Check out this video to see it in action: https://preview.screen.studio/share/r1h4DuAk. There are lots more demos at https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use on how we control the web with prompts.

We started coding a decade ago with Selenium bots and macros to automate tasks. Then we both moved into ML. Last November, we asked ourselves, “How hard could it be to build the interface between LLMs and the web?”

We launched on Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42052432) and have since been addressing various challenges of browser automation, such as: - Automation scripts break when the website changes - Automation scripts are annoying to build - Captchas and rate limits - parsing errors and API key management - and perhaps worst of all, login screens.

People use us to fill out their forms, extract data behind login walls, or automate their CRM. Others use the xPaths browser-use clicked on and build their scripts faster, or directly rerun the actions of browser-use deterministically. We’re currently working on robust task reruns, agent memory for long tasks, parallelization for repetitive tasks, and many other sweet improvements.

One interesting aspect is that some companies now want to change their UI to be more agent-friendly. Some developers even replace ugly UIs with nice ones and use browser-use to copy data over.

Besides the open-source we have an API. We host the browser and LLMs for you and help you with handling proxy rotation, persistent sessions and allowing you to run multiple instances in parallel. We price at $30/month—significantly lower than OpenAI’s Operator.

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.

We’d love to hear from you—what automation challenges are you facing? Any thoughts, questions, experiences are welcome!

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

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

#4
post #2

How are you different from https://www.browserbase.com/ and their Stagehand framework? [0] [0] https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand

From the first glance, browser-use is compatible with more models, and has (much) more github stars ;)

Coincidentally I played with it over the last weekend using Gemini model. It's quite promising!

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

#5
How 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/

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

#6
post #2

How are you different from https://www.browserbase.com/ and their Stagehand framework? [0] [0] https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand

From the first glance, browser-use is compatible with more models, and has (much) more github stars ;) Coincidentally I played with it over the last weekend using Gemini model. It's quite promising!

Yeah, we are much bigger and work on a higher level. stagehand work step by step, we are trying to make end to end web agents.

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

#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, congratulations. It's so good it's making other people win already, lol. I have so many use cases for this. I truly wish you the best!

Edit: Downvote me all you want, if you love scammers so much I can send you their contact so you can "invest" in their trash. Lol.

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

#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. This combined with your other two design choices let an exploit to escalate and infect their main machine.

Have you considered not using all these debugging permissions to productionize your service?

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

#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 interactions for system-use - but it would be pretty awesome if tools and services (like say, a website service) could be reflected there as it would save a lot of development overhead for the "LLM bindings".

Very interesting stuff you're building!

Post reply on HN