Remote Browser

A browser you and your agents share. Chromium runs off-screen on your own machine; you watch it and take over from a local dashboard, and an agent drives the same tabs and signed-in accounts over MCP.

• Watch the live page, take control to browse or sign in, then hand the tab back.

• Keep each session's cookies and sign-ins in its own profile, across restarts.

• Let an agent read compact page snapshots and click, type, scroll and upload.

• Save screenshots, record the session, and manage uploads and downloads per session.

• Copy and paste between your machine and the page.

• Give every MCP client its own API key, scoped to the sessions it may use.

How it runs

Two executables. The host serves the dashboard, speaks MCP over stdio and HTTP, and keeps the API keys, sessions and reservations. The engine owns one session's profile and paints it. The host starts an engine per session, so a crash never takes the dashboard with it.

Related MCP server: orchords-web-pilot

Build and run

Rust 1.88 or newer and Bun 1.3. The first engine build downloads the CEF binary distribution — roughly a gigabyte — and copies its runtime files beside the executable.

bun install
bun run build                                   # the dashboard bundle the host embeds
cargo build --release --manifest-path src/engine/Cargo.toml
cargo build --release --manifest-path src/host/Cargo.toml
./src/host/target/release/remote-browser-native \
  --engine-binary src/engine/target/release/remote-browser-cef-engine

The host prints the dashboard's address. Open it and the browser is yours: no account, no sign-in and no token. It listens on this machine only and refuses a request from any other origin, so a web page cannot drive it — but anything else running on your machine can, which is the trade for opening it with a click.

src/host/README.md documents the engine protocol, the MCP tools, the HTTP endpoints, the profile catalog and the smoke tests.

Connect an agent

The host speaks MCP over stdio, and over HTTP at /mcp on the dashboard port with an API key. A key is for agents: the dashboard itself has no sign-in, only its address. Create keys in Settings → API keys, where a key either reaches every session or exactly one. An agent that releases a tab closes it, so your own tabs stay as you left them. The agent-facing contract is described in skills/remote-browser/SKILL.md.

Checks

bun run check   # formatting, TypeScript, lint rules and the host's tests

The Python smoke tests under src/host/tests/ drive both executables end to end; see the host's README for how to run them.