@heynavtoor: THE VIRTUAL ASSISTANT INDUSTRY IS DONE. Two students at ETH Zurich shipped an MVP in four days. Now AI controls their C…

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browser-automation open-source ai-agents rpa mit-license web-scraping

Summary

Browser-Use, an open-source framework for AI-driven browser automation developed by ETH Zurich students, challenges the traditional RPA industry by offering free, self-healing capabilities that mimic human interaction without relying on brittle HTML parsing.

THE VIRTUAL ASSISTANT INDUSTRY IS DONE. Two students at ETH Zurich shipped an MVP in four days. Now AI controls their Chrome browser. Clicks. Types. Scrolls. Books flights. Fills CRMs. Scrapes leads. Submits applications. While they sleep. No Selenium. No UiPath license. No outsourced VA. No Zapier wiring. The numbers are insane: → Filipino virtual assistant: $8 to $12 an hour → US virtual assistant: $25 to $50 an hour → UiPath enterprise license: $20,000 to $100,000 a year → Browser-Use: $0. MIT licensed. Runs on your laptop. The science is wild: It does not parse HTML. It does not write CSS selectors that break the moment a website redesigns. It reads the page the way you read it. Screenshot in. Action out. The AI sees a search box, types the city. Sees a date picker, clicks May 15. The website redesigns tomorrow. Nothing breaks. The grift opportunity is wilder: Manus AI is built on Browser-Use. So is half of the AI agent layer raising rounds in 2026. Freelancers are shipping browser automations to local realtors, recruiters, and lead-gen agencies for $500 to $5,000 per workflow. One developer plus one weekend equals a business. The founders are Magnus Müller and Gregor Žunič. Two engineers from ETH Zurich. Y Combinator W25 batch. They open sourced the project in October 2024. Within 3 months they crossed 40,000 stars. Felicis led their $17 million seed round in March 2025. Paul Graham backed it. They run a 7-person team out of San Francisco. Here is what it does: → Drive any website with a single English prompt → Works with GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Llama, any LLM → Persistent login sessions, no captcha walls, no 2FA loops → Headless or watch-it-work mode → Multi-tab, multi-step workflows in one prompt → Self-corrects when an action fails → Pip install in 60 seconds → Free hosted cloud at http://browser-use.com or run it on your laptop Here is the wildest part: The company that built the framework powering Manus AI gave the framework away. MIT license. Free forever. Fork it. Run it. Sell automations on top of it. The numbers, today: 93,144 stars. 10,546 forks. 315 contributors. 123 releases. v0.12.6 released April 2026. Built since October 2024. MIT license. A $14 billion RPA industry charges enterprises six figures a year. Two engineers from ETH Zurich gave the same capability to anyone with a laptop. Your forms. Your tabs. Your workflows. No subscription. Free and open source. (Link in the comments)
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THE VIRTUAL ASSISTANT INDUSTRY IS DONE. Two students at ETH Zurich shipped an MVP in four days. Now AI controls their Chrome browser. Clicks. Types. Scrolls. Books flights. Fills CRMs. Scrapes leads. Submits applications. While they sleep. No Selenium. No UiPath license. No outsourced VA. No Zapier wiring. The numbers are insane: → Filipino virtual assistant: $8 to $12 an hour → US virtual assistant: $25 to $50 an hour → UiPath enterprise license: $20,000 to $100,000 a year → Browser-Use: $0. MIT licensed. Runs on your laptop. The science is wild: It does not parse HTML. It does not write CSS selectors that break the moment a website redesigns. It reads the page the way you read it. Screenshot in. Action out. The AI sees a search box, types the city. Sees a date picker, clicks May 15. The website redesigns tomorrow. Nothing breaks. The grift opportunity is wilder: Manus AI is built on Browser-Use. So is half of the AI agent layer raising rounds in 2026. Freelancers are shipping browser automations to local realtors, recruiters, and lead-gen agencies for $500 to $5,000 per workflow. One developer plus one weekend equals a business. The founders are Magnus Müller and Gregor Žunič. Two engineers from ETH Zurich. Y Combinator W25 batch. They open sourced the project in October 2024. Within 3 months they crossed 40,000 stars. Felicis led their $17 million seed round in March 2025. Paul Graham backed it. They run a 7-person team out of San Francisco. Here is what it does: → Drive any website with a single English prompt → Works with GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Llama, any LLM → Persistent login sessions, no captcha walls, no 2FA loops → Headless or watch-it-work mode → Multi-tab, multi-step workflows in one prompt → Self-corrects when an action fails → Pip install in 60 seconds → Free hosted cloud at http://browser-use.com or run it on your laptop Here is the wildest part: The company that built the framework powering Manus AI gave the framework away. MIT license. Free forever. Fork it. Run it. Sell automations on top of it. The numbers, today: 93,144 stars. 10,546 forks. 315 contributors. 123 releases. v0.12.6 released April 2026. Built since October 2024. MIT license. A $14 billion RPA industry charges enterprises six figures a year. Two engineers from ETH Zurich gave the same capability to anyone with a laptop. Your forms. Your tabs. Your workflows. No subscription. Free and open source. (Link in the comments)

Browser Use - The way AI uses the internet

Source: https://browser-use.com/ We launched Browser Use Desktop: a new browser experience, fully open source.Check it out 👀Agents at scale. Undetectable browsers. The API for any website.

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### Browser Harness Open-source, thin, self-healing harness. Give your agent superpowers to complete any task on the web.### Stealth Browsers Anti-detect, CAPTCHA solving, 195+ country proxies. Zero config.### Browser Use Box Your 24/7 Claude agent. Claude Code and Browser Harness in a remote box. Drive it from Telegram, the web, or SSH.### Web Agents Extract, automate, test, and monitor — in natural language.### Custom Models LLMs purpose-built for browser automation.### Proxies Residential IPs across 195+ countries. Rotating, undetected.

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