Show HN: A web browser agent in your Chrome side panel

Looks amazing, love it. And I see that in your roadmap the top thing is saving/replaying sessions

Related to that, I'd suggest also adding the ability to "templify" sessions, ie. turn sessions into sort of like email templates, with placeholder tags or something of the like, that either ask the user for input, or can be fed input from somewhere else (like an "email merge")

So for example, if I need to get certain data from 10 different websites, either have the macro/session ask me 10 times for a new website (or until I stop it), or allow me to just feed it a list

Anyway, great work! Oh also, if you want to be truly privacy-first you could add support for local LLMs via ollama

Looks awesome. Last couple of months, I've built a similar Chrome Extension, https://overlay.one/en

I also started with with conversational mode and interactive mode, but later removed the interactive mode to keep its features a bit simple.

Very nice. I tried with Ollama and it works well.

The biggest issue is having the Ollama models hardcoded to Qwen3 and Llama 3.1. I imagine most Ollama users have their favorites, and probably vary quite a bit. My main model is usually Gemma 3 12B, which does support images.

It would be a nice feature to have a custom config on the Ollama settings page, save those to Chrome storage, and use that in the 'getAvailableModels' method, along with the hardcoded models.

> Since BrowserBee runs entirely within your browser (with the exception of the LLM), it can safely interact with logged-in websites, like your social media accounts or email, without compromising security or requiring backend infrastructure.

Does it send the content of the website to the LLM?

Looks amazing. Would love something like this in Firefox or Zen. Mozilla released Orbit, but it was never something that ended up really being useful.

What makes it privacy first?

Shouldn't it use local llm then?

Does it send my password to a provider when it signs up to a website for me?

You might be able to reduce the amount of information sent to the LLM by 100 fold if you use a stacking context. Here is an example of one made available on Github (not mine). [0] Moreover, you will be able to parse the DOM or have strategies that parse the DOM. For example, if you are only concerned with video, find all the videos and only send that information. Perhaps parsing a page once finding the structure and caching that so the next time only the required data is used. (I see you are storing tool sequence but I didn't find an example of storing a DOM structure so that requests to subsequent pages are optimized.)

If someone visits my website that I control using your Chrome Extension, I will 100% be able to find a way to drain all their accounts probably in the background without them even knowing. Here are some ideas about how to mitigate that.

The problem with Playwright is that it requires Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) which opens massive security problems for a browser that people use for their banking and managing anything that involves credit cards are sensitive accounts. At one point, I took the injected folder out of Playwright and injected it into a Chrome Extension because I thought I needed its tools, however, I quickly abandoned it as it was easy to create workflows from scratch. You get a lot of stuff immediately by using Playwright but likely you will find it will be much lighter and safer to just implement that functionality by yourself.

The only benefit of CDP for normal use is allowing automation of any action in the Chrome Extension that requires trusted events, e.g. play sound, go fullscreen, banking websites what require trusted event to transfer money. I'm my opinion, people just want a large part of the workflow automated and don't mind being prompted to click a button when trusted events are required. Since it doesn't matter what button is clicked you can inject a big button that says continue or what is required after prompting the user. Trusted events are there for a reason.

[0] https://github.com/andreadev-it/stacking-contexts-inspector

Chrome canary already had Gemini Nano built in into the browser for local LLM. For the use cases you mentioned there is no need to call a 3rd party.

I keep getting the "Error: Failed to stream response from [Gemini | OpenAi] API. Please try again." - tried valid new keys from both google/openai

This looks fun, thanks for sharing. Will definitely give it a shot soon.

I read over the repo docs and was amazed at how clean and thorough it all looks. Can you share your development story for this project? How long did it take you to get here? How much did you lean on AI agents to write this?

Also, any plans for monetization? Are you taking donations? :)

Can it perform DOM manipilation as well, like fill forms or would the LLM response need to be structured for each specific site to use it on? And would an LLM be able to perform such a task?