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Open-source browser for AI agents

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Hi HN, I forked chromium and built agent-browser-protocol (ABP) after noticing that most browser-agent failures aren’t really about the model misunderstanding the page. Instead, the problem is that the model is reasoning from a stale state.ABP is designed to keep the acting agent synchronized with the browser at every step. After each action (click, type, etc), it freezes JavaScript execution and rendering, then captures the resulting state. It also compiles the notable events that occurred during that action loop, such as navigation, file pickers, permission prompts, alerts, and downloads, and sends that along with a screenshot of the frozen page state back to the agent.The result is that browser interaction starts to feel more like a multimodal chat loop. The agent takes an action, gets back a fresh visual state and a structured summary of what happened, then decides what to do next from there. That fits much better with how LLMs already work.A few common browser-use failures ABP helps eliminate: * A modal appears after the last Playwright screenshot and blocks the input the agent was about to use * Dynamic filters cause the page to reflow between steps * An autocomplete dropdown opens and covers the element the agent intended to click * alert() / confirm() interrupts the flow * Downloads are triggered, but the agent has no reliable way to know when they’ve completedAs proof, ABP with opus 4.6 as the driver scores 90.5% on the Online Mind2Web benchmark. I think modern LLMs already understand websites, they just need a better tool to interact with them. Happy to answer questions about the architecture, forking chrome or anything else in the comments below.Try it out: `claude mcp add browser -- npx -y agent-browser-protocol --mcp` (Codex/OpenCode instructions in the docs)Demo video: https://www.loom.com/share/387f6349196f417d8b4b16a5452c3369

HN · launched Mar 11, 2026 · 155 upvotes (top 5%) · 0 views

Niche: headless browser automation infrastructure · 31 launches, 2 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Agent / copilot
  • Developer
  • AI-native
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No This requires modifying and compiling the Chromium source code in C++ to introduce custom agent synchronization protocols deep inside the browser engine.

What it would actually take: Building this requires checking out the massive Chromium codebase and adding custom IPC hooks and event listeners into Blink and the V8 rendering/DOM update pipeline. A custom C++ networking daemon exposes the Agent Browser Protocol (ABP) to keep LLM agents strictly synchronized with asynchronous DOM mutations and network requests. This necessitates deep systems programming expertise in Chromium internals, C++, and low-level browser architectures.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Playwright, Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), OpenClaw, Electron, Brave

Concerns raised: Maintaining custom Chromium fork across major releases is difficult, Doesn't solve async/non-deterministic server issues (WebSockets, long-polling, background fetches), Limited to simple tasks like forms; fails on SPAs with optimistic UI updates, Google unlikely to upstream the freezing API due to security/stability concerns, Anti-bot detection fingerprints headless Chromium forks

Feature requests: ABP as first-party citizen alongside Chrome DevTools Protocol, Deterministic checkpoints/logging hooks for external identity systems and session management, Better handling of aggressive anti-bot detection

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 810 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #74 of 811 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 130 days after the earliest competitor.

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