Browser-Use: The Open Source Alternative to AI Computer Control

When OpenAI released Operator on ChatGPT – complete with that impressive demo showing AI booking a hotel and only asking for help when stuck – I was immediately hooked. The future of AI-powered automation seemed within reach.

Until I realised that it was only available under Pro, not Plus - with the price tag to match: $200 per month for the Pro plan.

Perplexity has also jumped into computer use, offering AI that can interact with your computer like a human would – looking at screens, moving cursors, clicking buttons, and typing text. But again, it’s expensive and still experimental.

Then I discovered Browser-Use through a YouTube video, and everything changed. Here was an open-source solution I could run locally on my own machine.

The Playwright Connection

After downloading Browser-Use, I noticed something familiar: one of its core dependencies was Playwright.

I knew Playwright as an end-to-end testing framework – the tool developers use to create automated tests that verify user workflows still function after code changes. You can even set it up to run automatically through GitHub Actions every time you push code.

But Browser-Use had taken Playwright’s core capabilities – launching Chrome tabs (Chromium) and interacting with browsers through clicks and scrolls – and repurposed them brilliantly. Instead of running predefined tests, Browser-Use feeds user tasks to an AI agent and lets it loose.

How Browser-Use Works

My understanding of the process is elegantly simple:

1. Screenshot: Take a screenshot of the current website
2. Analysis: Identify all possible actions available on the page
3. Decision: The AI agent analyzes the best action to take given its assigned task
4. Execution: Use Playwright to perform the action (click, scroll, type, etc.)
5. Loop: Return to step 1 until the task is complete or the agent gets stuck

This cycle continues seamlessly, creating a surprisingly human-like browsing experience driven entirely by AI reasoning.

The Setup Experience

The ease of setup was remarkable. The only cost was providing an OpenAI API key. For a third of the price of an oat latte, I had three hours of genuine fun watching AI navigate the web autonomously.

It was great to be able to pass credentials to the AI agent, and the option of lifecycle hooks allows you greater control than I thought was possible.

I’m excited to explore more use cases for this, and potentially use Browser-Use to automate time-consuming tasks that require some ‘thinking’ to complete. Its potential use cases for research and compiling data sets are intriguing.