playwright-mcp

A standalone MCP server (browser_mcp.py) that lets an LLM read JavaScript-rendered webpages as token-efficient Markdown.

It keeps one warm headless Chromium instance, opens an isolated browser context per request, extracts the main content with trafilatura (dropping navigation, ads and boilerplate), and converts it to Markdown with markdownify.

Tool

fetch_webpage_markdown(url: str, wait_for_selector: str = "") -> str

• Navigates with wait_until="domcontentloaded" (15 s timeout).

• If wait_for_selector is given, waits up to 5 s for it; otherwise waits 1 s for client hydration.

• Falls back to the raw page HTML if content extraction fails.

• Output uses ATX (#) headers; script, style, noscript, svg and button are stripped.

Related MCP server: markfetch-mcp

Recommended: run in Docker (isolated)

Dependencies, Chromium and every page it opens live inside a throwaway container: non-root user, no host mounts, no extra capabilities, memory/CPU capped, removed on exit. Nothing is installed on your system.

docker build -t browser-mcp .

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "browser": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run", "-i", "--rm",
        "--cap-drop=ALL", "--security-opt=no-new-privileges",
        "--memory=1g", "--cpus=1", "--pids-limit=256",
        "--ipc=host",
        "browser-mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Notes: only http(s) URLs are accepted (no file://). The container can still reach your LAN/localhost services through Docker's network; add a restrictive --network or firewall rule if you need to block that.

Install without Docker

Requires Python 3.10+.

pip install mcp playwright trafilatura markdownify
playwright install chromium

Register with an MCP client

Add to claude_desktop_config.json (or your client's MCP settings), using the absolute path to browser_mcp.py and the Python interpreter that has the dependencies installed:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "browser": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/playwright-mcp/browser_mcp.py"]
    }
  }
}

Restart the client after editing the config.

Usage example

Ask the assistant:

Use fetch_webpage_markdown to read https://example.com and summarize it.

For pages that render content client-side, pass a selector to wait for:

{
  "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/",
  "wait_for_selector": "table.itemlist"
}

To try the server interactively: npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector python browser_mcp.py.