GitHub - detrin/brow: Standalone Playwright CLI for AI agent browser automation - control real Chromium with simple commands, token-optimized screenshots, and reliable interactions

The browser tool agents win with: 82% task success at ~$0.22/task — beating browser-use, playwright-mcp, and agent-browser on 22 benchmark tasks.

A standalone Playwright CLI that gives your agent a real Chromium instance with an agent-friendly API — structured commands for common actions, plus an eval escape hatch for full power.

Install

Homebrew:

brew tap detrin/tap
brew install brow

pip:

Then install Chromium once (either method above):

brow setup            # ~150MB, one-time

Agent skill:

# For most agents (Cline, Cursor, Amp, Gemini CLI, etc.)
npx -y skills add detrin/brow

# For OpenCode (manual install)
git clone https://github.com/detrin/brow.git
ln -s "$(pwd)/brow/skills/brow" ~/.opencode/skills/brow   # OpenCode

Example: Find Bars Near Times Square with Google Maps

A real use case: use your Google account to search Maps in a city you've never visited, and extract structured results.

Step 1: Log into Google (once)

Open a headed browser with a persistent profile and sign in manually:

brow session new --profile personal --headed
brow navigate -s 1 "https://accounts.google.com"
# Sign in manually in the browser window...
brow session delete 1

Your login is saved in ~/.brow/profiles/personal/ -you won't need to sign in again.

Step 2: Ask Claude Code to search

Paste this into Claude Code:

Open a brow session with my personal profile, go to Google Maps, and search for bars near Times Square in New York. Return the names, Google Maps URLs, ratings, and number of reviews in a markdown table.

Claude Code runs:

brow session new --profile personal --headed    # → 1 (already logged in)
brow navigate -s 1 "https://www.google.com/maps/search/bars+near+Times+Square+New+York"
brow screenshot -s 1
brow eval -s 1 "
results = await page.evaluate('''() => {
    const items = document.querySelectorAll('div.Nv2PK');
    return Array.from(items).slice(0, 8).map(el => {
        const name = el.querySelector('.fontHeadlineSmall, .qBF1Pd');
        const rating = el.querySelector('.MW4etd');
        const reviews = el.querySelector('.UY7F9');
        const link = el.querySelector('a[href*=\"/maps/place\"]');
        return {
            name: name?.innerText || '',
            rating: rating?.innerText || '',
            reviews: reviews?.innerText.replace(/[()]/g, '') || '',
            url: link?.href || ''
        };
    });
}''')
import json
result = json.dumps(results, indent=2)
"
brow session delete 1

Result

Bar	Rating	Reviews	Link
The Riff Raff Club	4.4	60	Maps
Ascent Lounge	4.4	646	Maps
Jimmy's Corner	4.6	2,195	Maps
O'Donoghue's Times Square	4.4	2,633	Maps
The Dickens	4.8	2,128	Maps
The Woo Woo	4.8	1,871	Maps

Because the google profile persists your login, you get personalized results -no cookie banners, no sign-in walls, just data.

Benchmarks

22 tasks total (16 fixture + 6 new), Claude Sonnet via AWS Bedrock. Compared against playwright-cli, MCP Playwright, agent-browser (Rust/CDP), and browser-use (full-stack agent framework).

Metric	brow	agent-browser	browser-use	playwright-cli	MCP Playwright
Success rate (16 fixture)	88% (14/16)	63% (10/16)	63% (10/16)	50% (8/16)	44% (7/16)
Success rate (22 total)	82% (18/22)	64% (14/22)	64% (14/22)	55% (12/22)	36% (8/22)
Avg tokens/task (16 fixture)	68K	73K	75K	113K	118K
Avg tokens/task (22 total)	88K	69K	81K	96K	132K
Avg tool calls	9.6	11.2	5.8	9.6	11.6
Avg wall-clock (fixture)	41s	36s	73s	44s	50s
Est. cost/task	$0.22	$0.23	$0.27	$0.35	$0.37

brow leads on success rate across both suites. On token efficiency, brow leads the 16-task fixture suite (68K avg) but agent-browser is most efficient across all 22 tasks (69K avg) — brow's average is inflated by one live task (github-trending-python: 383K tokens, agent didn't use snapshot filtering). browser-use runs its own agent loop — included for completeness.

Per-task success grid, token breakdown, and analysis: benchmarks/README.md

Commands

Daemon

brow daemon start [--port 19987]
brow daemon stop
brow daemon status

Sessions

brow session new [--profile <name>] [--headed]
brow session list
brow session delete <id>

Navigation

brow -s <id> navigate <url>
brow -s <id> wait <selector>
brow -s <id> wait --load

Observation

brow -s <id> snapshot [--search <regex>] [--locator <selector>]
brow -s <id> screenshot [--full] [--path <file>]
brow -s <id> html [--locator <selector>] [--search <regex>]
brow -s <id> logs [--search <regex>] [--count <n>]
brow -s <id> url

Interaction

brow -s <id> click <selector>
brow -s <id> fill <selector> <value>
brow -s <id> type <text>
brow -s <id> key <key>            # Enter, Tab, Meta+a
brow -s <id> hover <selector>
brow -s <id> scroll <pixels>
brow -s <id> scroll-to <selector>
brow -s <id> drag <from> <to>
brow -s <id> upload <selector> <filepath>

Pages

brow -s <id> page list
brow -s <id> page new [url]
brow -s <id> page close [index]
brow -s <id> page switch <index>

Profiles & State

brow profile list
brow profile delete <name>
brow state save <name> -s <id>
brow state restore <name> -s <id>
brow state list

Eval

Variables available in eval: page, context, browser, state, pages.

Selectors

Playwright selector syntax:

CSS: button.submit, #login
Text: text=Login
Role: role=button[name="Save"]
XPath: xpath=//div

Architecture

  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  Agent (Claude Code, script, etc.)                              │
  │                                                                 │
  │  brow session new --headed          ← start browser             │
  │  brow navigate -s 1 "https://..."   ← go to page               │
  │  brow snapshot -s 1                 ← read page (a11y tree)     │
  │  brow click -s 1 "text=Login"       ← interact                  │
  │  brow fill -s 1 "#email" "me@..."   ← fill form                 │
  │  brow screenshot -s 1               ← capture screen            │
  │  brow eval -s 1 "await page..."     ← escape hatch              │
  │  brow session delete 1              ← cleanup                   │
  └──────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                 │ HTTP (localhost:19987)
                 ▼
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  brow daemon (FastAPI + uvicorn)     │
  │                                      │
  │  ┌──────────┐  ┌──────────────────┐  │
  │  │ Session 1 │  │ ProfileManager   │  │
  │  │ (browser) │  │ ~/.brow/profiles │  │
  │  ├──────────┤  └──────────────────┘  │
  │  │ Session 2 │                       │
  │  │ (browser) │  ┌──────────────────┐  │
  │  └──────────┘  │ StateManager     │  │
  │                 │ ~/.brow/states   │  │
  │                 └──────────────────┘  │
  └──────────────┬───────────────────────┘
                 │ CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol)
                 ▼
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  Chromium (via Playwright)           │
  │                                      │
  │  ┌────────┐ ┌────────┐ ┌────────┐   │
  │  │ Page 1 │ │ Page 2 │ │ Page 3 │   │
  │  └────────┘ └────────┘ └────────┘   │
  └──────────────────────────────────────┘

Daemon auto-starts on first brow command
Persistent Chromium profiles for login session survival
One browser per session, full isolation
Headless by default, --headed to watch

Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
`BROW_HOME`	`~/.brow`	Data directory
`BROW_PORT`	`19987`	Daemon port
`BROW_MAX_SESSIONS`	`10`	Max concurrent sessions

Resource Usage

~150-300MB per Chromium instance. 10 sessions = ~2-3GB.

License

MIT