unblink

A pure-Go (no cgo, no Chromium) "web browser" whose purpose is not visual rendering but exposing web information to an AI model. unblink fetches a page, parses it, strips visual-only junk (scripts, styles, navigation, ads), and hands the model a clean, token-budgeted Markdown representation — over the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

An AI doesn't need pixels. It needs structured meaning.

fetch(url) → parse HTML5 → [optionally execute JS] → semantic reduction → emit Markdown

Status

v0.18.0. The full pipeline works end to end: MCP tools covering reading, navigation, sessions, forms, structured data, schema extraction, site discovery, and search. The static read path turns most server-rendered pages into clean Markdown with zero JavaScript; the JavaScript engine — on by default (opt out with --disable-js) — renders mainstream SPA frameworks and powers live interactive sessions (interact). It ships as one static binary (~36 MB) with a ~26 MB idle footprint — measured head-to-head on identical pages, roughly 5× lighter idle and 10× faster to start than a headless Chromium, turning SPA fixtures around in ~2–10 ms per render (ahead of the warm-browser MCP tools on the same corpus — the settle proves idleness instead of waiting out a quiet window, ADR 0004), and it reads a nav-heavy page for ~1% of the tokens of a browser-tool accessibility snapshot (measured, against all four alternatives). See docs/architecture.md for the full design (phases 0–23) and its non-goals, and docs/comparison.md for how unblink compares to other AI web-browsing tools (Playwright MCP, Charlotte, Obscura, Lightpanda).

Requirements

The official MCP Go SDK requires Go ≥ 1.25. The Makefile sets GOTOOLCHAIN=auto, so the go command downloads the toolchain pinned in go.mod automatically — you do not need to install Go 1.25 yourself, and your global go env is left untouched. (If you run go directly rather than via make, prefix commands with GOTOOLCHAIN=auto.)

Install

GOTOOLCHAIN=auto go install github.com/christopherdavenport/unblink/cmd/unblink@latest

Or run the multi-arch (amd64/arm64) Docker image — no Go toolchain needed:

docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/christopherdavenport/unblink:latest --version

Or download a prebuilt binary from the GitHub releases page, or build from source (see Build & run).

Use it with an MCP client

unblink speaks MCP over stdio, so any MCP-capable client launches it as a subprocess. For Claude Code:

claude mcp add unblink -- /path/to/unblink
# or, via Docker (no install):
claude mcp add unblink -- docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/christopherdavenport/unblink:latest

For Claude Desktop (or any client using the mcpServers config shape), add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "unblink": {
      "command": "/path/to/unblink",
      "args": []
    }
    // or, via Docker:
    // "unblink": {
    //   "command": "docker",
    //   "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "ghcr.io/christopherdavenport/unblink:latest"]
    // }
  }
}

JavaScript rendering is on by default; add --disable-js for the zero-JavaScript static read path (lighter, still handles most server-rendered pages). Add flags like --search-provider or --tls-mimic to

... View full README on GitHub