browser_skill

Overview

This skill provides minimal Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) tools for browser automation, interactive DOM picking, scraping, and screenshots. It is designed for quick setup and hands-on exploration when you need to start Chrome with remote debugging, run page JavaScript, or capture page artifacts. Use it to drive navigation, extract content, and collect visual evidence with a lightweight CLI interface.

How this skill works

The tools start a Chrome instance with remote debugging enabled and connect via CDP to control tabs. You can navigate pages, evaluate JavaScript expressions in the page context, take viewport screenshots, and interactively pick DOM elements by clicking on the page. JavaScript evaluation runs in an async page context and supports single-expression or IIFE-style code passed as a one-line string.

When to use it

• Quickly automate browser navigation and interactions for scraping or testing
• Extract page data or JSON payloads with inline JavaScript evaluation
• Capture screenshots for visual verification or evidence
• Select precise CSS selectors or text using the interactive picker
• Work with authenticated sessions by launching Chrome with your profile

Best practices

• Start Chrome with the profile flag when you need logged-in state (cookies and sessions)
• Keep evaluated JavaScript as a single expression or an IIFE on one line to ensure correct execution
• Launch the Chrome process before running other commands to avoid connection failures
• Use the picker for complex DOM targeting, and combine it with eval to extract attributes or structured data
• Use new tabs for parallel exploration with the navigation command's new-tab option

Example use cases

• Scrape product listings by navigating to pages, counting items, and extracting attributes with eval
• Automate login flows by starting Chrome with your profile and navigating programmatically
• Collect screenshots of pages for regression testing or visual monitoring
• Interactively pick form fields, buttons, or text nodes to generate reliable selectors for automation scripts
• Open secondary tabs to compare pages or capture multiple artifacts in one session