BrowserBee

AI

browser agent

SHOW HN2025

153points
63comments
#478of 3,837 in 2025
Top 13%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

DebatedReal support and real criticism

8 positive, 15 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 9 critical, out of 32 comments about the project. Thread score +0.03.

Privacy: 0 for, 4 againstExecution: 1 for, 3 againstIdea: 1 for, 1 againstDesign: 2 for, 0 againstPricing: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Clean, simple UI

    From 1 comment
    • This looks really well done. I particularly like the simple user interface. A lot of the time these things are unnecessarily complex I feel.
      jaggs on HN
  • Works well with Ollama and multiple models

    From 2 comments
    • Very nice. I tried with Ollama and it works well. The biggest issue is having the Ollama models hardcoded to Qwen3 and Llama 3.1. I imagine most Ollama users have their…
      matula on HN
    • Looks great! Tried a few examples and models, works very well.
      afshinmeh on HN

Objections

  • Sends page content to the LLM, so 'privacy-first' is questioned

    From 3 comments
    • yes, the LLM can invoke observation tools (e.g. read the text/DOM or take a screenshot) to retrieve the context it needs to take the next action
      parsabg on HN
    • So maybe something we want to be mindful of before using this on banking, health, etc. How is it “privacy-first” then if it literally sends all your shit to the LLM?
      barbazoo on HN
    • What makes it privacy first? Shouldn't it use local llm then? Does it send my password to a provider when it signs up to a website for me?
      hoppp on HN
  • Token usage and cost are high for web tasks

    From 2 comments
    • Looks like the example video is extremely expensive. It racks up almost 2$ of usage in about a minute.
      reliablereason on HN
    • Good spot. I probably shouldn't have the 2nd most expensive model in the demo! Some of the cheaper models have very similar performance at a fraction of a cost, or indeed you…
      parsabg on HN
  • Struggles with DOM parsing on complex tasks

    From 1 comment
    • Thanks for building this! It struggled with tasks I asked for (e.g. download the March and April invoices for my GitHub org "myorg") -- it got errors parsing the DOM and…
      tnjm on HN
  • Gemini 2.5 and OpenAI models error out

    From 2 comments
    • I keep getting the "Error: Failed to stream response from [Gemini | OpenAi] API. Please try again." - tried valid new keys from both google/openai
      saadshamim on HN
    • ah yea 2.0 flash is working. 2.5 doesn't and OpenAi 4.0 and mini models dont work either. The error message should probably say to try other models because i was pretty confused
      saadshamim on HN

Requests

  • Firefox support

    From 2 comments
    • Looks great. Any plans for this to work in Firefox?
      donclark on HN
    • Looks amazing. Would love something like this in Firefox or Zen. Mozilla released Orbit, but it was never something that ended up really being useful.
      dbdoskey on HN
  • Reduce DOM tokens sent to the LLM

    From 2 comments
    • You might be able to reduce the amount of information sent to the LLM by 100 fold if you use a stacking context. Here is an example of one made available on Github (not mine).…
      dataviz1000 on HN
    • possibly something like https://github.com/romansky/dom-to-semantic-markdown could also help for this use case.
      kanzure on HN
  • Saved and templated sessions

    From 1 comment
    • Looks amazing, love it. And I see that in your roadmap the top thing is saving/replaying sessions Related to that, I'd suggest also adding the ability to "templify" sessions, ie.…
      nico on HN
  • Custom Ollama model configuration

    From 1 comment
    • Very nice. I tried with Ollama and it works well. The biggest issue is having the Ollama models hardcoded to Qwen3 and Llama 3.1. I imagine most Ollama users have their…
      matula on HN

Questions

  • Does it send page content to the LLM?

    From 1 comment
    • > Since BrowserBee runs entirely within your browser (with the exception of the LLM), it can safely interact with logged-in websites, like your social media accounts or email,…
      barbazoo on HN
  • How does it fill forms and interact with the page?

    From 2 comments
    • How does it do so? Just DOM manipulation, viewport scanning or something of the sort?
      0xd1r on HN
    • Can it perform DOM manipilation as well, like fill forms or would the LLM response need to be structured for each specific site to use it on? And would an LLM be able to perform…
      0xd1r on HN

Alternatives named

  • Browser Use

    From 2 comments
    • Here are some ideas on how to cache selectors for reuse and get all the text to use with full text search to find clickable elements slow but still faster than a round trip to a…
      dataviz1000 on HN
    • Thanks for building this! It struggled with tasks I asked for (e.g. download the March and April invoices for my GitHub org "myorg") -- it got errors parsing the DOM and…
      tnjm on HN
  • Playwright MCP

    From 1 comment
    • You might be able to reduce the amount of information sent to the LLM by 100 fold if you use a stacking context. Here is an example of one made available on Github (not mine).…
      dataviz1000 on HN
  • Cline

    From 1 comment
  • uBlock Origin

    From 1 comment
  • Firefox AI sidebar

    From 1 comment
    • Firefox already has something similar natively, but it's not enabled by default. If you turn on the new sidebar they have an AI panel, which basically looks like an iframe to the…
      tux3 on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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