Hey HN, we’re Gregor and Magnus, the founders of browser-use (<a href="https://browser-use.com/">https://browser-use.com/</a>), an easy way to connect AI agents with the browser. Our agent library is open-source (<a href="https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use">https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use</a>) 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!<p>Check out this video to see it in action: <a href="https://preview.screen.studio/share/r1h4DuAk" rel="nofollow">https://preview.screen.studio/share/r1h4DuAk</a>. There are lots more demos at <a href="https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use">https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use</a> on how we control the web with prompts.<p>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?”<p>We launched on Show HN (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42052432">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42052432</a>) 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>We’d love to hear from you—what automation challenges are you facing? Any thoughts, questions, experiences are welcome!
Have you inspected or thought through the security of your open source library?<p>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.<p>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.<p>Have you considered not using all these debugging permissions to productionize your service?
I've been following your progress for a while now and I'm super impressed how far you've got already.<p>Are you working on unifying the tools that the LLM uses with the MCP / model context protocol?<p>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".<p>Very interesting stuff you're building!
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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
How are you different from <a href="https://www.browserbase.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.browserbase.com/</a> and their Stagehand framework? [0]<p>[0]<a href="https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand">https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand</a>
Awesome job launching guys! We used Browser Use last week to order burgers from our smart glasses:<p><a href="https://x.com/caydengineer/status/1889835639316807980" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/caydengineer/status/1889835639316807980</a><p>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?
Does anyone have experience comparing this to Skyvern[0]? I originally thought the $30/month would be the killer feature, but it's only $30 worth of credits. Otherwise they both seem to have the same offering<p>[0] <a href="https://www.skyvern.com/">https://www.skyvern.com/</a>
AI agents have lead to a big surge in scraping/crawling activity on the web, and many don't use proper user agents and don't stick to any scraping best practices that the industry has developed over the past two decades (robots.txt, rate limits). This comes with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported on HN.<p>Do you have any built-in features that address these issues?
A UI based on browser-use:<p><a href="https://github.com/browser-use/web-ui">https://github.com/browser-use/web-ui</a>
> 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.<p>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.<p>I predict that this project is likely going to change to AGPL or a new business license to combat against this.
How do you keep your service from being blocked on LinkedIn?<p>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.<p>0 - <a href="https://www.definite.app/" rel="nofollow">https://www.definite.app/</a>
Gregor and Magnus, the only thing I want in the world is an agent that removes all of the bad from the web:<p>- No more ads. No more banner ads. No more Google search ads. No more promoted stories. No more submarine ads.<p>- No more spam. Low quality content is nuked.<p>- No more clickbait. Inauthentic headlines from dubious sources are removed.<p>- No more rage comments. Angry commenters are muted. I have enough to worry about in my day.<p>- No more low-information comments. All the "Same." and "Nice." and low informational comments are removed to help me focus.<p>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.<p>In the future, advertisers pay me for the privilege of pitching me. No ad reaches me without my consent or payment.<p>Please fix the internet. We've waited thirty years for this.
This looks very promising. Thank you for making it open source! At first glance, I couldn't find if you can run it using local models (ollama?). Is that at all possible?<p>Edit: for anyone else looking for this, it seems that you can: <a href="https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/blob/70ae758a3bfa76a19bff715ef6363571ed2245d8/docs/customize/supported-models.mdx#ollama">https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/blob/70ae758a3bfa...</a>
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 (<a href="https://alumnium.ai" rel="nofollow">https://alumnium.ai</a>) 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.
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
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?
Are you planning on adding any stealth measures?<p>The first site (Idealista) I tried it on flagged and blocked me / my home IP as a bot within 10 seconds.
This looks fantastic — congrats on the launch.<p>As an armchair observer, the agents + browser space feels like it’s waiting for someone to make the open source framework that everyone piles on to.<p>Proxy rotation sounds like a solid way to monetize for businesses.
i tried the reddit quickstart example in the repo and it seemed to be incapable of completing the task.<p><a href="https://pastebin.com/PnLnQ3kY" rel="nofollow">https://pastebin.com/PnLnQ3kY</a>
Is it possible to mix browser-use with traditional DOM/XPath/CSS-selector automation? e.g. Have certain automation steps that are more fuzzy/AI like "click on the image of a cat"
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?
Congrats on the launch!<p>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"<p>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.<p>Either way good luck!
Ha!<p>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.<p>Anyway, this is a great project, congratulations. It's so good it's making other people win already, lol. I have <i>so many</i> use cases for this. I truly wish you the best!<p>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.
Hi, great contribution! Can you highlight how does it compare to <a href="https://github.com/TaxyAI/browser-extension">https://github.com/TaxyAI/browser-extension</a> which also uses the DOM?