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by wraptile 259 days ago
Most browsers these days expose a control API (like ChromeDevtools Protocol MCP [1]) that open up a socket API and can take in json instructions for bidirectional communication. Chrome is the gold standard here but both Safari and Firefox have their own driver.

For you existing browser session you'd have to start it already with open socket connection as by default that's not enabled but once you do the server should able to find an open local socket and connect to it and execute controls.

worth nothing that this "control browser" hype is quite deceiving and it doesn't really work well imo because LLMs still suck at understanding the DOM so you need various tricks to optimize for that so I would take OP's claims with a giant bag of salt.

Also these automations are really easy to identify and block as they are not organic inputs so the actual use is very limited.

- https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp/
1 comments
raffraffraff 259 days ago
It's extremely handy too! If you try to use web automation tools like selenium or playwright on a website that blocks them, starting chrome browser with the debug port is a great way to get past Cloudflare's "human detector" before kicking off your automation. It's still a pain in the ass but at least it works and it's only once per session
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wraptile 259 days ago
Note that while --remote-debugging-port itself cannot be discovered by cloudflare once you attach a client to it that can be detected as Chrome itself changes it's runtime to accomodate the connection even if you don't issue any automation commands. You need to patch the entire browser to avoid these detection methods and that's why there are so many web scraping/automation SAAS out there with their own browser versions as that's the only way to automate the web these days. You can't just connect to a consumer browser and automate undetected.
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raffraffraff 258 days ago
True, it fails to get past the Cloudflare check if my playwright script is connected to the browser. But since these checks only happen on first visit to the site I'm ok with that.
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cess11 259 days ago
Isn't this what SeleniumBase does?
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