Show HN: A web browser agent in your Chrome side panel
I'm excited to share BrowserBee, a privacy-first AI assistant in your browser that allows you to run and automate tasks using your LLM of choice (currently supports Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and Ollama). Short demo here: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/209c7042-6d54-4fc...
Inspired by projects like Browser Use and Playwright MCP, its main advantage is the browser extension form factor which makes it more convenient for day to day use, especially for less technical users. Its also a bit less cumbersome to use on websites that require you to be logged in, as it attaches to the same browser instance you use (on privacy: the only data that leaves your browser is the communication with the LLM - there is no tracking or data collection of any sort).
Some of its core features are as follows:
- a memory feature which allows users to memorize common and useful pathways, making the next repetition of those tasks faster and cheaper
- real-time token counting and cost tracking (inspired by Cline)
- an approval flow for critical tasks such as posting content or making payments (also inspired by Cline)
- tab management allowing the agent to execute tasks across multiple tabs
- a range of browser tools for navigation, tab management, interactions, etc, which are broadly in line with Playwright MCP
I'm actively developing BrowserBee and would love to hear any thoughts, comments, or feedback.
Feel free to reach out via email: parsa.ghaffari [at] gmail [dot] com
-Parsa
Related to that, I'd suggest also adding the ability to "templify" sessions, ie. turn sessions into sort of like email templates, with placeholder tags or something of the like, that either ask the user for input, or can be fed input from somewhere else (like an "email merge")
So for example, if I need to get certain data from 10 different websites, either have the macro/session ask me 10 times for a new website (or until I stop it), or allow me to just feed it a list
Anyway, great work! Oh also, if you want to be truly privacy-first you could add support for local LLMs via ollama
I like that suggestion. Saved prompts seem like an obvious addition, and having templating within them makes sense. I wonder how well would "for each of the following websites do X" prompts work (so have the LLM do the enumeration rather than the client - my intuition is that it won't be as robust because of the long accumulated context)
Edit: forgot to mention it does support Ollama already
I also started with with conversational mode and interactive mode, but later removed the interactive mode to keep its features a bit simple.
Does it send the content of the website to the LLM?
How is it “privacy-first” then if it literally sends all your shit to the LLM?
Also, the line is blurry for some people on “privacy” when it comes to LLMs. I think some people, not me, think that if you are talking directly to the LLM provider API then that’s “private” whereas talking to a service that talks to the LLM is not.
And, to be fair, some people use privacy/private/etc language for products that at least have the option of being private (Ollama).
Because it supports Ollama, which runs the LLM entirely locally on your own hardware, thus data sent to it never leaves your machine?
Edit: joshstrange beat me to the same conclusion by mere moments. :)
Would love to explore a FF port. Right now, there are a couple of tight Chrome dependencies:
- CDP - mostly abstracted away by Playwright so perhaps not a big lift
- IndexedDB for storing memories and potentially other user data - not sure if there's a FF equivalent
[0] https://caniuse.com/indexeddb
If someone visits my website that I control using your Chrome Extension, I will 100% be able to find a way to drain all their accounts probably in the background without them even knowing. Here are some ideas about how to mitigate that.
The problem with Playwright is that it requires Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) which opens massive security problems for a browser that people use for their banking and managing anything that involves credit cards are sensitive accounts. At one point, I took the injected folder out of Playwright and injected it into a Chrome Extension because I thought I needed its tools, however, I quickly abandoned it as it was easy to create workflows from scratch. You get a lot of stuff immediately by using Playwright but likely you will find it will be much lighter and safer to just implement that functionality by yourself.
The only benefit of CDP for normal use is allowing automation of any action in the Chrome Extension that requires trusted events, e.g. play sound, go fullscreen, banking websites what require trusted event to transfer money. I'm my opinion, people just want a large part of the workflow automated and don't mind being prompted to click a button when trusted events are required. Since it doesn't matter what button is clicked you can inject a big button that says continue or what is required after prompting the user. Trusted events are there for a reason.
[0] https://github.com/andreadev-it/stacking-contexts-inspector
I read over the repo docs and was amazed at how clean and thorough it all looks. Can you share your development story for this project? How long did it take you to get here? How much did you lean on AI agents to write this?
Also, any plans for monetization? Are you taking donations? :)
I might write a short post on the development process, but in short:
- started development during Easter so roughly a month so far
- developed mostly using Cline and Claude 3.7
- inspired and borrowed heavily by Cline, Playwright MCP, and Playwright CRX which had solved a lot of the heavy lifting already - in a sense this project is those 3 glued together
I don't plan to monetize it directly, but I've thought about an opt-in model for contributing useful memories to a central repository that other users might benefit from. My main aim with it is to promote open source AI tools.
- The ones the user sees (like a sidepanel). These often use LLM API's like OpenAI.
- The browser API ones. These are indeed local, but are often very limited smaller models (for Chrome this is Gemini Nano). Results from these would be lower quality, and of course with large contexts, either impossible or slower than using an API.
So most likely the LLM can chose how to "see" the page?