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Yes exactly - today we send it a simplified version of the DOM, but we're currently building an agent which will be able to discover the relevant DOM elements.
How do you see the product evolving as agents become better and better?
First, as models get better, our agent's ability to navigate a website and generate accurate automation scripts will improve, giving us the ability to more confidently perform multi-step generations and get better at one-shotting automations.
We expect browser agents will improve as well, which I think is more along the lines of what you're asking. At scale, we still think scripts will be better for their cost, performance, and debuggability aspects - but there are places where we think browser agents could potentially fit as an add-on to deterministic workflows (e.g., handling inconsistent elements like pop-ups or modals). That said, if we do end up introducing a browser agent in the execution runtime, we want to be very opinionated about how it can be used, since our product is primarily focused on deterministic scripting.
This actually makes a ton of sense to me in lots of the LLM contexts (e.g. seeing how we are starting to prefer having LLMs write one-off scripts to do API calls rather than just pointing them at problems and having them try it directly).
Thanks!
Is there a plan to change this? Building on Electron should make it manageable to go cross-platform. 2026 will be the year of the Linux desktop, as the prophecies have long foretold.
Off-topic, but Kernel refers to https://www.onkernel.com. A bit of an awkward name
Also yeah, Kernel refers to onkernel - they call it that because they're running the browsers in a unikernel. They're a great product and you should give them a look if you need hosted browsers!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
Please port to linux soon (sure it's relatively trivial on Electron :)).
Like the idea of the IDE. Seems like it'd make it easy to prototype and launch quickly.
RE: embrace the suck, yeah I'm with you. I prefer the brittleness of scripts to non-deterministic (potentially unhinged) workflows
Why the subscription model though? That's the one thing that concerns me.
Is data being sent back to your servers to enable some of the functionality? I don't speak for my employer here, but as someone who works in the healthcare technology industry, if I wanted to get my bosses to buy into this, I would be looking for something that we license to run on our environments.
> Why the subscription model though?
The subscription model is primarily to cover the costs of creating and running automations at scale (i.e., LLM code gen and browser uptime) and to build a sustainable business around those features. We included the free tier to give users access to the IDE, but we're committed to adding value beyond just the IDE and subscriptions support that.
> Is data being sent back to your servers to enable some of the functionality?
Yes - we save all notebooks in our database. Since we're working to build a lot of value-add features for hosted executions, having notebooks saved online worked in service of that.
That said, we're now thinking about the local-only / no sign-up use case as well. We've gotten a lot of feedback about this, so it's something we're taking seriously now that we've gotten all of the core functionality in.
I will also add, we are HIPAA-compliant for healthcare use cases.
Really appreciate the questions!
Yes, you can use BrowserBook to write e2e test automations, but we don't currently include playwright assertions in the runtime - we excluded these since they are geared toward a specific use case, and we wanted to build more generally. Let us know if you think we should include this though; we're always looking for feedback.
> For scraping, how do you handle Cloudflare and Captchas?
Cloudflare turnstiles/captchas tend to be less of an issue in the inline browser because it’s just a local Chrome instance, avoiding the usual bot-detection flags from headless or cloud browsers (datacenter IPs, user-agent quirks, etc.). For hosted browsers, we use Kernel's stealth mode to similar effect.
> Do you respect robots.txt instructions of websites?
We leave this up to the developer creating the automations.
ALSO is there any plan for integrating with CI pipelines... being able to run these scripts headless on servers would be huge.
BUT overall it's refreshing to see someone lean into brittle scripts rather than hide behind agent magic...
For captchas, we use Kernel's stealth mode which includes a captcha solver.
Re: CI integration, today we support API-based execution, but if you have a specific CI pipeline or set of tools you'd like to see support for, let us know and we can look into it!
We're constantly thinking about ways we can improve the dev experience and integrations story around deploying these scripts. Right now we support API executions, and we are adding webhooks soon. We think this will unblock the earliest adopters, and as we learn more about popular use cases/workflows, we'll look to prioritize first-class integrations where it makes sense.
Somewhere there is a timeline where front-ends evolved differently.
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