Launch HN: Browser Use (YC W25) – open-source web agents
28 comments
·February 25, 2025cookiengineer
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!
gregpr07
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?
arjunchint
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?
gregpr07
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?
tnolet
How are you different from https://www.browserbase.com/ and their Stagehand framework? [0]
baal80spam
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!
gregpr07
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.
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OsrsNeedsf2P
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
gregpr07
I think our cloud is much simpler (just one prompt and go). But it's also sort of a different service. The main differences come from the open source side - we are essentially building more of a framework for anytime to use and they are just a web app.
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mritchie712
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.
MagMueller
If you run it locally, you can connect it to your real browser and user profile where you are already logged in. This works for me for LinkedIn automation, e.g., to send friend requests or answer messages.
A bigger problem on LinkedIn for us is all the nested UI elements and different scrolling elements. With some configuration in our extraction layer in buildDomTree.js and some custom actions, I believe someone could build a really cool LinkedIn agent.
AznHisoka
What are you trying to do on LinkedIn? I find it’s fairly easy to crawl public non-profile pages like company pages, but once you get into crawling profiles or posting content, it gets tricky. Also FYI, LinkedIn’s head of legal recently stated they are going after people scraping actual people content (as in legally filing lawsuits, not just technical hindrance)
xnx
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"
gregpr07
We are experimenting with this. Currently the library api is very raw but technically possible (we introduced this notion of initial actions, which are just deterministic actions before the LLM kicks in) - https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/blob/main/example....
The other way to achieve this with Browser Use is to save the history from `history = agent.run()` and rerun it with `agent.rerun_history(history)`.
I'd love to see if this can of any use to you!
jackienotchan
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.
Do you have any built-in features that address these issues?
MagMueller
Yes, some hosting services have experienced a 100%-1000% increase in hosting costs.
On most platforms, browser use only requires the interactive elements, which we extract, and does not need images or videos. We have not yet implemented this optimization, but it will reduce costs for both parties.
Our goal is to abstract backend functionality from webpages. We could cache this, and only update the cache if eTags change.
Websites that really don't want us will come up with audio captchas and new creative methods.
Agents are different from bots. Agents are intended as a direct user clone and could also bring revenue to websites.
erellsworth
>Websites that really don't want us will come up with audio captchas and new creative methods.
Which you or other AIs will then figure a way around. You literally mention "extract data behind login walls" as one of your use cases so it sounds like you just don't give a shit about the websites you are impacting.
It's like saying, "If you really don't want me to break into your house and rifle through your stuff, you should just buy a more expensive security system."
srameshc
That was my first thought. I am building something with content created by a very small team of subject matter experts. All our hours of efforts will be scrapped in few minutes regardless I like it or not. There is no way to prevent now that everyone has access to these tools.
anyekwest
These guys are goated
moralestapia
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.
MagMueller
For me, it simply demonstrates how easy and fast you can build these tools now. We have many fellow YC founders who build great products on top of browser-use. They don't have to quote us. I think it's awesome to enable so many new startup ideas.
giarc
Did they claim the project as their own, or did they use the open source to build a project?
moralestapia
They claimed the project as their own, with a title like "AI agents that do things for you".
One of the judges explicitly asked if they actually made this thing or was it something else like "a video" showing what it would be like.
One of the team members confidently replied it was real and that they made it all during the weekend.
It was a bit too good to be true.
Edit: I found a video of the thing. I initially posted it here but decided to delete it, the reason for that is I don't think they deserve to be publicly shamed. We were all having fun and they probably got a little carried away. If any of them sees this just don't do that next time. Play fair.
baal80spam
The audacity. Imagine if someone googled and exposed them.
abrichr
Which hackathon?
taytus
Most hackathons are like that.
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!