browser-research-mcp

Browser-based research as an MCP server. Drives a real Chromium via patched Playwright (patchright) so the agent can read JavaScript-rendered tables, dynamic charts, login-walled dashboards, and AJAX dropdowns that the cheaper rungs of the fetch ladder can't reach.

This is the last rung of the ladder:

web_search → web_fetch → pdf_fetch → http_post_form → browser-research

Tools

Tool	Purpose
visit(url, …)	Open a URL with Chromium, return DOM text + screenshot. Cheap, no LLM call.
extract(url, focus, …)	visit + Sonnet structured extraction. Same response shape as pdf_fetch_structured. Sends the screenshot to Sonnet so chart values drawn via canvas/SVG get picked up.

Why patchright

patchright is a drop-in Apache-2.0 patched Playwright that disables the AutomationControlled blink feature, removes Runtime.enable leaks, and a few other detection vectors. Indian government dashboards (PPAC, RBI, MoSPI, SEBI) work fine with this without paying for residential proxies or a hosted browser SaaS.

Run locally

uv tool install browser-research-mcp --python 3.12
# Install Chromium for patchright (one-off):
uv tool run patchright install chromium

# stdio (Claude Desktop / Cursor / desktop clients):
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=… uvx browser-research

# HTTP (the platform backend):
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=… uvx browser-research --transport streamable-http --port 7862

Environment

Var	Required	Default
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	for extract (not visit)	—
ANTHROPIC_MODEL	no	claude-sonnet-4-6
HEADLESS	no	true (false to debug locally)
MCP_TRANSPORT	no	stdio
MCP_HOST / PORT	no	0.0.0.0 / 7862

Stack

Layer	Library
Browser engine	patchright (patched Playwright)
Structured extraction	Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6, with vision input
MCP transport	mcp[server] FastMCP — stdio / SSE / streamable-http
Session isolation	One Playwright context per MCP client_id