I built barebrowse: give a local-model agent a browser without Playwright — pruned ARIA snapshots instead of raw HTML (far fewer tokens)

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA 07/10/26, 07:00 AM Tools

open-source local-models browser-agent token-efficiency aria-snapshot nodejs mcp-server

Summary

barebrowse is a tool that generates pruned ARIA snapshots from web pages, reducing token consumption for local AI models by stripping boilerplate and ads, and reusing existing browser cookies.

Author here, sharing something I built. If you run agents on a local model, feeding a whole page as raw HTML burns your context fast. barebrowse turns a URL into a pruned ARIA snapshot — the semantic tree with nav/ads/boilerplate stripped — so each page is a fraction of the tokens. Useful when the context window is your bottleneck. No Playwright / bundled Chromium — it drives a browser you already have (Chrome/Brave/Edge/Chromium) directly over CDP. Pruned ARIA snapshot instead of raw HTML/DOM — far fewer tokens per page for the model to read. Reuses cookies from your real browser profile, so logged-in pages just work (no login scripting). Vanilla JS, ES modules, Node 22+, two tiny deps. Ships an MCP server + CLI, so it drops into local agent setups. MIT, open source. Repo: https://github.com/hamr0/barebrowse — happy to take feedback or feature requests.

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