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johnys 4 hours ago

Curious: what are people using as the best open source and locally hosted versions to have agents browse the web?

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verdverm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Playwright, same thing we use when doing non-ai automation

Fun fact, ai can use the same tools you do, we don't have to reinvent everything and slap a "built for ai" label on it

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antves 2 hours ago | parent [-]

We love these tools but they were designed for testing, not for automation. They are too low-level to be used as they are by AI.

For example, the playwright MCP is very unreliable and inefficient to use. To mention a few issues, it does not correctly pierce through the different frames and does not handle the variety of edge cases that exist on the web. This means that it can't click on the button it needs to click on. Also, because it lacks control over the context design, it cannot optimize for contextual operations and your LLM trace gets polluted with incredible amount of useless tokens. This increases cost, task complexity for the LLM, and latency

On top of that, these tools rely on the accessibility tree, which is just not a viable approach for a huge number of websites

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verdverm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

again (see other comment), you are not listening to users and asking questions, you are telling them they are wrong

You describe problems I don't have. I'm happy with Playwright and other scraping tools. Certainly not frustrated enough to pay to send my data to a 3rd party

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antves an hour ago | parent [-]

have you tried any other AI browser automation tools? we would be curious to hear about your use cases because the use cases we have been working on with our customers involve scenarios where traditional playwright automations are not viable, e.g. they operate on net new websites and net new tasks for each execution

	▲	verdverm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm unwilling to send my data to a 3rd party that is so new on the scene Consider me a late adopter because I care about the security of my data. (and no, whatever you say about security will not change my mind, track record and broader industry penetration may) Make it self-hostable, the conversation can change