browser-rs

One real browser. Many agents. A ~5.5 MB Rust server.

browser-rs is a lightweight, stealth-oriented browser MCP server. It lets multiple AI agents share one logged-in Chrome — each agent controls only its own tabs — for parallel scraping, web automation, and QA without every agent spinning up its own browser. 67 Playwright-style tools, one Rust binary, no Node.js runtime.

flowchart LR
    A["Agent A<br/>owner=research"] --> M["browser-rs MCP<br/>one Rust process"]
    B["Agent B<br/>owner=operations"] --> M
    C["Agent C<br/>owner=qa"] --> M
    M --> H["one shared Chrome<br/>persistent profile"]
    H --> T1["research tabs"]
    H --> T2["operations tabs"]
    H --> T3["qa tabs"]

Why browser-rs?

The default mode uses a locally installed, headful Chrome with a persistent profile and does not inject page patches, minimizing common automation signals. It does not guarantee bot-detection bypass — no automation stack can — but ships reproducible detector runners under bench/ so changes can be tested against current browsers and detectors. See DESIGN.md for how the stealth defaults work.

¹ Historical maintainer measurements excluding Chrome, taken from idle local servers. Exact memory varies by OS, build, runtime, and workload; treat these figures as an order-of-magnitude comparison, not a benchmark guarantee. The release binary size can be checked with du -h target/release/browser-rs.

Quick start

1. Install — on macOS arm64 and Linux x64 the installer downloads a prebuilt binary. A locally installed Google Chrome or Chromium is also required.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maestrojeong/browser-rs-mcp/main/install.sh | sh
browser-rs --help

To pin this release instead of following latest:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maestrojeong/browser-rs-mcp/main/install.sh | AB_VERSION=v0.1.23 sh

2. Run — use stdio for a client that launches the server:

browser-rs

3. Verify — point an MCP client at it and drive the browser:

browser_navigate  → https://example.com   # a headful Chrome window opens
browser_snapshot                          # returns the accessibility tree

The common workflow is: browser_snapshot, act, then inspect the returned accessibility diff. Most interaction tools accept a snapshot ref or a CSS selector.

Other install options — direct downloads, SHA-256 files, source builds, and updating a running binary — are in INSTALL.md. To build from source:

cargo install --git https://github.com/maestrojeong/browser-rs-mcp ab-mcp

Set AB_CHROME if Chrome is not in a standard location.