brow-cli 1.1.0

Standalone Playwright CLI for agent browser automation

brow - agentic browsing

Standalone Playwright CLI for agent browser automation. Launches a real Chromium instance with an agent-friendly API - structured commands for common actions, eval escape hatch for full power.

Documentation →

Install

Homebrew:

brew tap detrin/tap
brew install brow

pip:

pip install brow-cli
playwright install chromium

Agent skill:

npx -y skills add detrin/brow

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.

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

brow -s <id> eval <code>

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

Benchmarks

16 fixture tasks, Claude Sonnet via AWS Bedrock, 1 run each. Compared against playwright-cli, MCP Playwright, agent-browser, and browser-use.

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	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); agent-browser leads across all 22 tasks (69K avg) — brow's 22-task average is inflated by a single live task where the agent didn't use snapshot filtering. agent-browser wins on wall-clock speed. browser-use runs its own agent loop — included for completeness.

Full results and per-task breakdown →

Resource Usage

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

License

MIT