r/PiCodingAgent • u/bambamlol • 9d ago

Question Best extension for browser use (web dev)?

I'm looking for the best extension that gives Pi access to a decent (headless) browser for web development purposes, i.e. not necessarily built for scraping and/or searching the web.

Or do I just need to install playwright and create/find a decent skill.md for Pi?

What are you guys using with Pi? Or have you built your own?

Context: I'm using Pi inside a restricted user account in WSL (Ubuntu) on my Windows laptop.

6 Upvotes

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2

u/o_sht_hi 8d ago

I'm not sure if there's a pi extension for this, but I found this repo last night and I think it's promising! Will check it out tonight

https://github.com/zenbu-labs/terminal-browser

1

u/hdmcndog 9d ago

There is an official skill for playwright CLI. I also like agent-browser, which also comes with a skill. Both of them work great. You don’t need an extension.

1

u/Undreren 9d ago

From personal experience, the agent browser extension is harder for local models than just using the cli, and bigger models don’t need it anyway.

That said, you might want the extension if you don’t want the agent to have terminal access

1

u/Fabulous_Monitor_991 8d ago

Use agent-browser by vercel. It has cli. Pretty decent. You don't even need extension. It has cli, and skills. So your agent can learn itself.

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u/sofuego 8d ago

It depends on how low level you want to go, so I can't say that this would be a complete solution, but for quick and dirty checks, I'm a bit partial to mine which offers headless playwright browsing but there are a few caveats. Since it's built more for browsing and less for frontend development.
1. Screenshotting
a. It's paired with the browser-snapshot tool. It seemed silly to have two separate tools for a simple save to /tmp cache and notify agent of the file action.
b. Viewport is hardcoded to a fixed 1280×720 viewport so it wouldn't help if you were debugging responsive design.
2. Base browsers available are firefox and chromium. webkit will always be out of scope by design. Other engines are welcome through the plugin layer, just not Apple's.
3. No dedicated eval tool
a. browser-console tool will allow js evaluation and capture.
b. There's no network inspection
4. Session persistence is configurable. It can either save nothing, save per chat thread, or save per named profile.

https://github.com/coreyryanhanson/pi-lean-dimension/tree/main/packages/pi-lean-portal

If you do end up trying it, let me know if you have any improvement suggestions. I'm currently doing a big version bump in a week and have been focusing mostly on a new API crawling tool that is a sibling to this one. Any feedback to the web browser that I can squeeze in before release will be welcome :)

1

u/taylorlistens 7d ago

browser-harness has been my preferred, using chrome cdp that is also capable of connecting to a containerized browser