What is a browser agent?+
A browser agent is an AI system that controls a real or headless browser — navigating pages, clicking elements, filling forms, and extracting data — to complete tasks that require web interaction.
What are the most popular browser automation frameworks for AI agents?+
Playwright and Puppeteer are the foundation. AI-native tools like Browser Use, Stagehand, and Browserbase add LLM vision and natural language control on top.
Browser agents vs traditional web scraping — what's the difference?+
Traditional scraping is brittle (breaks on layout changes) and requires coding XPath/CSS selectors. Browser agents use vision + language models to adapt to UI changes and handle dynamic, JavaScript-heavy pages.
What can browser agents NOT do reliably?+
CAPTCHAs, multi-factor auth flows, heavy WebGL/canvas UIs, and real-time streaming pages are still challenging. Most production browser agents need human handoff for edge cases.