browser-automation

What This Skill Does

The browser-automation skill is a powerful bridge that connects OpenClaw to your local Google Chrome environment via the MCP (Model Context Protocol). By leveraging this skill, your AI agent gains the ability to interact with the web just like a human user. It can navigate to specific URLs, manipulate web page elements, extract text content, manage browser sessions, and even capture visual representations of sites through screenshots. Because it integrates directly with your existing browser instance, it retains your login sessions, cookies, and browsing context, making it ideal for automating recurring web-based tasks that would otherwise require manual intervention.

Installation

Installation follows a three-part process to ensure secure communication between OpenClaw and your browser:

1. Native Bridge: Install the bridge via npm or pnpm using npm install -g mcp-chrome-bridger followed by mcp-chrome-bridger register to enable system-level communication.
2. Chrome Extension: Download the latest MCP Chrome Extension from GitHub releases. Install it by navigating to chrome://extensions/ in Chrome, enabling "Developer mode," and selecting "Load unpacked" to point to the downloaded directory.
3. MCP Client Configuration: Depending on your environment, add the server configuration to your OpenClaw settings using either the Streamable HTTP method (recommended for flexibility) or the STDIO method (for local, process-isolated communication).

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for users who want to save time on repetitive browser workflows. Common use cases include auto-filling complex forms, scraping structured data from websites into spreadsheets, managing long-term research by searching your history and bookmarks, or performing regression testing by simulating user clicks across multiple pages. It is also excellent for monitoring specific web elements or network requests when debugging applications.

Example Prompts

1. "Open my Gmail tab, find the latest email from 'Support', and take a screenshot of the body content."
2. "Go to the project management dashboard, add a bookmark for the current page, and list all my existing project-related bookmarks."
3. "Search my browser history for pages I visited last Tuesday about 'OpenClaw documentation' and summarize the key information from them."

Tips & Limitations

For the best results, ensure your browser is kept in a stable state. Complex dynamic sites (like those using heavy shadow DOMs) may occasionally require retries. The tool works best when you keep the browser window focused or visible. Be mindful that excessive automation may trigger bot-detection mechanisms on some websites; consider setting reasonable delays between automated actions to maintain a natural browsing profile.