Show HN: Browser MCP – Automate your browser using Cursor, Claude, VS Code

Hey, as a maker, I get it. You spent time building something, and you want to understand how it gets used. If you're not collecting personal info, there is nothing wrong with this.

Knee-jerk reactions aren't helpful. Yes, too much tracking is not good, but some tracking is definitely important to improving a product over time and focusing your efforts.

When people see “I collect” they won’t even bother reading further.

This is showstopper.

Noble reasons won’t matter.

Spyware perception.

Correct. Telemetry should _always_ be opt-in and explicitly an easy choice to not engage.

Any other mode of operation is morally bankrupt.

This automatic sense of entitlement to surveil users is the absolute embodiment of the banality of evil.

It's 2025 - we want informed consent and voluntary participation with the default assumption that no, we do not want you watching over our shoulders, and no, you are not entitled to covertly harvest all the data you want and monetize that without notifying users or asking permissions. The whole ToS gotcha game is bullshit, and it's way past time for this behavior to stop.

Ignorance and inertia bolstering the status quo doesn't make it any less wrong to pile more bullshit like this onto the existing massive pile of bullshit we put up with. It's still bullshit.

... And have reviewed and understand completely

it does, CF bans my own honest to God clicks if I do them too fast.

Modern captchas use a number of tools including many of the approaches you mentioned. This why you might sometimes see a CloudFlare "I am not a robot" checkbox that checks itself and moves along before you have much time to even react. It's looking at a number of signals to determine that you're probably human before you've even checked the box.

> I'm wondering if it is something like they can track mouse movement

Yes, this is a big signal they use.

> adding some more human like noise to the mouse

Yes, this is a standard avoidance strategy. Easier said than done. For every new noise generation method, they work on detection. They also detect more global usage patterns and other signals, so you'd need to immitate the entire workflow of being human. At least within the noise of their current models.

Have a lot of small things count towards the result. Users behave quite linearly, extra points if they act differently all of a sudden.

Actually, the CAPTCHAs are in place mostly because of assholes like you abusing other assholes like you[0].

Most of the automated misbehavior is businesses doing it to other businesses - in many cases, it's direct competition, or a third party the competition outsources it to. Hell, your business is probably doing it to them too (ask the marketing agency you're outsourcing to).

> If you truly need access to something, ask for an API, may you need to pay for it, maybe you don't.

Like you'd give it to me when you know I want it to skip your ads, or plug it to some automation or a streamlined UI, so I don't have to waste minutes of my life navigating your bloated, dog-slow SPA? But no, can't have users be invisible in analytics and operate outside your carefully designed sales funnel.

> May you get it, maybe the site owner tells you to go pound sand and you should take that as you're behaviour and/or use case is not wanted.

Like they have a final say in this.

This is an evergreen discussion, and well-trodden ground. There is a reason the browser is also called "user agent"; there is a well-established separation between user's and server's zone of controls, so as a site owner, stop poking your nose where it doesn't belong.

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[0] - Not "you" 'mrweasel personally, but "you" the imaginary speaker of your second paragraph.

Isn't the idea of AI agent talking to each by telling LLM model to reply say in, JSON and with some parameter value map to, say function in Python code? That in retrospect, given context {prompt} to LLM will be able to call said function code?

Is this what 'calling' is?

> with a "browser MCP" it is now possible: ChatGPT has a way to tell your browser "open Google maps", "show me a screenshot", "click at that position", etc

It seems strange to me to focus on this sort of standard well in advance of models being reliable enough to, ya know, actually be able perform these operations on behalf of the user with any sort of strong reliability that you would need for widespread adoption to be successful.

Cryptocurrency "if you build it they'll come" vibes.

You actually can, its called Operator and its a complete waste of time, just like 99% of agents/MCPs.

That's not fault of MCP though, that's the fault of vendors peddling their MCPs while clinging to the SaaS model.

Yes, MCP is a way to streamline giving LLMs ability to run arbitrary code on your machine, however indirectly. It's meant to be used on "your side of the airlock", where you trust the things that run. Obviously it's too powerful for it to be used with third-party tools you neither trust nor control; it's not that different than downloading random binaries from the Internet.

I suppose it's good to spell out the risks, but it doesn't make sense blaming MCP itself, because those risks are fundamental aspects of the features it provides.

Most of these are not a real concern with remote servers with Oauth. If you install the PayPal MCP MCP server from im-deffo-not-hacking-you.com than https://mcp.paypal.com/sse its the same sec model as anything else online...

The article also reeks of LLM ironically

At the risk of it sounding like i support theft; the automobile, you know, enabled the likes of Bonnie and Clyde and that whole era of lawlessness. Until the fbi and crossing county lines became a thing.

So im not sure id give up the sum total progress of the automobile just because the first decade was a bad one

Not OP but I definitely sympathise with them. I don't know how practical it is to implement or how profitable it would be, but the problem I often have is this: * I have something I want to buy and have specific needs for it (height, color, shape, other properties) * I know that there's a good chance the website I'm on sells a product that meets those needs (or possibly several such that I'd want to choose from) * my criteria are more specific than the filters available on the site e.g. I want a specific length down to a few cm because I want the biggest thing that will fit in a fixed space * crucially for an AI use case: the information exists on the individual product pages. They all list dimensions and specifications. I just don't want to have to go through them all.

Example: find me all of the desks on IKEA that come in light coloured wood, are 55 inches wide, and rank them from deepest to shallowest. Oh, and make sure they're in stock at my nearest IKEA, or are delivering within the next week.

Agreed, I'd been working on a Google Sheets specific MCP last week – just got it published here: https://github.com/mkummer225/google-sheets-mcp

haha yeh as someone who has built automation for years i can agree with this. You cant just click on something in a script, you need to reliably click on something. As a user, its very easy for you to make adjustments like clicking twice on a link if it doesnt load in time. Thats pretty much what your automation suite needs to end up with. A series of a functions to emulate user actions. You then combine that together with your scripts to create reliable scripts that can run in different conditions. LLMs wont do that for you, u need to instruct them specifically.

It seems the benefit of MCP is for Anthropic to enlist the community in building integrations for Claude desktop, no?

And if other vendors sign on to support MCP, then it becomes a self reinforcing cycle of adoption.

The interesting thing about MCP as a tool use protocol is the traction that it has garnered in terms of clients and servers supporting it.

I'm a bit stuck on this, maybe you can explain why an LLM would have any difficulty writing REST API calls? Seems like it should be no problem.

But AI already supported function calling, and you could describe them in various ways. Isn't this just a different way to define function calling?

It's working now with the 0.1.0 for me. But I will let you know if I experience any issues once I get updated to 0.1.1.

Thanks, great job! I like it overall, but I noticed it has some issues entering text in forms, even on google.com. It's able to find a workaround and insert the searched text in the URL, but it would be nice if the entry into forms worked well for UI testing.