BraveMCP — Your Browser Memory, Accessible by Claude

BraveMCP is a local-first browser extension + MCP server that captures everything you browse — pages, bookmarks, highlights, notes — and makes it searchable by Claude Desktop as a personal "second brain."

Everything stays on your machine. No cloud. No tracking. Just your own memory, given to Claude.

Demo

Claude answers a vague "do you remember…" question by searching your local browser memory — fully offline. A real screen-recorded GIF can replace this mockup; see docs/RECORDING.md.

Related MCP server: acheron-mcp-server

What It Does

Example

You: "Do you remember that article about MCP security I read last week?"

Claude: (calls find_forgotten_content) → "Yes — you visited MCP Security Guidelines 4 days ago, 3 times. It covers sandbox credential handling and shell injection prevention. Want a summary?"

How It Works

Brave Browser
    ↓ (tab visits, bookmarks, highlights)
Extension (Manifest V3)
    ↓ POST /api/...
HTTP Bridge (Express :3747)
    ↓
MCP Server ←→ SQLite + ChromaDB
    ↓ stdio JSON-RPC
Claude Desktop

• Extension — Manifest V3. Auto-captures tab changes, bookmarks, and context-menu text highlights.

• HTTP Bridge — Express server on port 3747, runs inside the MCP server process to receive extension payloads.

• Storage — SQLite (FTS5 full-text search) + ChromaDB (local vector embeddings). Nothing leaves your machine.

• AI Pipeline — Ollama (llama3.2 / nomic-embed-text) for local summarization and embeddings, with Anthropic API as fallback.

• MCP Server — Exposes 13 tools to Claude Desktop over stdio.

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Node.js v18+

• Brave or Chrome browser

• Claude Desktop

• (Optional) Ollama for local AI — ollama pull llama3.2 && ollama pull nomic-embed-text

• (Optional) Python 3.10+ for ChromaDB vector search — pip install chromadb

Install

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/BraveMCP.git
cd BraveMCP
npm run setup

npm run setup handles everything: installs dependencies, builds TypeScript, and checks ports.

Connect to Claude Desktop

Add this to %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows) or ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brave-memory": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/BraveMCP/mcp-server/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop.

Load the Browser Extension

1. Open brave://extensions (or chrome://extensions)

2. Enable Developer mode

3. Click Load unpacked → select the /extension folder

(Optional) Start ChromaDB for Semantic Search

pip install chromadb
chroma run --path ./storage/chroma

ChromaDB runs at http://localhost:8000. Without it, BraveMCP falls back to SQLite keyword search — still works great.

Available MCP Tools

Once connected, Claude can call any of these 13 tools:

Page Capture Flow

The extension auto-syncs tab visits in the background. For full page content (text body + AI summary), click "Capture Content" in the extension popup. This sends the page body to the MCP server, which stores it in SQLite and generates an AI summary and vector embedding.

Claude can also save a page directly: capture_current_page(url, title, content, summary).

Project Structure

BraveMCP/
├── extension/              # Manifest V3 browser extension
│   ├── background.js       # Service worker: tab sync, bookmarks
│   ├── content.js          # DOM extraction for page capture
│   ├── manifest.json
│   └── popup/              # Extension UI
├── mcp-server/             # Node.js MCP server
│   ├── src/
│   │   ├── index.ts        # MCP tools + Express HTTP bridge
│   │   ├── storage/
│   │   │   ├── database.ts # SQLite schema, FTS5, migrations
│   │   │   └── chroma.ts   # ChromaDB client
│   │   └── ai/
│   │       └── pipeline.ts # Embeddings + summarization pipeline
│   └── tsconfig.json
├── scripts/
│   └── setup.js            # One-command setup script
├── storage/                # SQLite DB lives here (git-ignored)
└── package.json            # Root: runs setup script

Roadmap

• Phase 1 — MCP server scaffold

• Phase 2 — SQLite storage layer (FTS5, migrations)

• Phase 3 — Browser extension (Manifest V3)

• Phase 4 — Vector search + AI pipeline (Ollama / Anthropic fallback)

• Phase 5 — Advanced tools (digest, sessions, forgotten content, tab cleanup)

• Phase 6 — Polish + public release

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

MIT — built by Yehezkiel Tampubolon