wittydeveloperop2 days ago
We built Stagehand 2 years ago (24k stars and 4M monthly npm downloads) and recently fixed its biggest flaw: round-trip latency.
Every action performed requires a round trip between your script and the browser (short when running locally but increased when running in the cloud). We also saw multiple posts complaining about the eager token appetite of Playwright MCP.
For this reason, we rebuilt Stagehand from the ground up and shipped v4, where Stagehand controls the browser from an extension automatically loaded upon your browser startup.
Stagehand v4 comes with batch command support, dedicated token-efficient methods `act()` and `extract()`, and a brand new architecture making it 2x faster than Playwright and 80% more token efficient.
You can see for yourself by looking at our benchmarks, comparing its performance across a dozen models (frontier and open weights) and tools (Codex, Claude Code, and more): https://www.stagehand.dev/evals
Ask me anything!
Phemist20 hours ago
I've been using Playwright a lot and also hit on the friction between playwright's web testing scope (e.g. no 1st class support for "muted" start-up of browsers, jeez) and usage for task automation all the time. This looks very interesting!
How does stagehand deal with complex http/websocket request/response and or console message filtering? https://docs.stagehand.dev/v4/reference/page#on E.g. I would like a script that tracks all communication that matches a specific filter (implemented as an anonymous function/lambda). This filter may look at patterns in the url, but sometimes needs to do a deeper inspection of also the payload (if the url does not carry enough information in itself).
I've found playwright to be prohibitively slow at this, not only because of the round-trip latency, but just the simple fact that it needs to pump the complete response to my filter function, which then proceeds to read only a couple of bytes to make the filtering decision. There are a lot of cases where I am only interested in around 1% of the total requests processed by the filter, which makes this behaviour massively wasteful.
Ideally I would like to run this filter in the browser as well. It currently simply searches the first 100 bytes (usually enough) for a given substring, but a more flexible filter would be good, perhaps even a filter func that is eval'ed in the extension? From the documentation, I don't see this use-case is currently supported. Are there any plans along these lines? :)
bradleyy20 hours ago
I'm using playwright to do diagnosis on customer sites, and I'm wondering some things:
1) Does it have full Chrome Devtools support? Like, able to diagnose where a fetch() came from, what script sets a cookie? 2) How hard would it be to set up in an AWS Lambda (I can run Playwright without needing to run a container, which saves a lot of startup time/cost)?
Always interesting to see forward work on these kinds of tools which get used so foundationally billions of times a day.
[deleted]2 days agocollapsed
squidproquo19 hours ago
How does the “Token efficiency Hybrid accessibility-tree trimming” work?
MiguelG71918 hours ago
We also just added Jev support https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand/pull/2952
On the act/extract/observe evals it shows promising results being extremely efficient
- act: 4.3x faster, 97% fewer LLM calls. Pass rate: 97.5% -> 98.3%. - heldout: 4.1x faster, 78% fewer LLM calls. Pass rate: 87.5% -> 97.5%. - observe: 11.1x faster, 69% fewer LLM calls. Pass rate: 75.0% -> 83.3%. - extract: 8.7x faster, 75% fewer LLM calls. Pass rate unchanged at 92%.
cost effectively 0
ulrikrasmussena day ago
Looks very useful, and I like the caching idea which I think makes it interesting for self-healing CI tests.
How does it determine when a cached act() fails and has to be re-evaluated by the LLM? And in particular, if the cache is saved in the cloud (Browserbase?), won't this lead to a lot of cache churn if used in CI pipelines where different versions of the site are running against the same cache?
Also, is there a technical reason why the cache couldn't just be a local file that's checked in along with the script but must be provided by Browserbase? If it was, devs could heal failing tests locally using LLM calls, while CI runs entirely deterministically.
vishalanton2 days ago
So for an enterprise with a 1,000 test Playwright suite, does this basically mean ~2x faster CI times? That would be huge.
wittydeveloperop2 days ago
Exactly, as Stagehand now runs inside the browser, you'll save on the round trip. Also, enabling batch actions will further accelerate your test suite.
sa468 hours ago
Tests typically drive the browser on the same machine. What round trip are we talking about here? Process-to-process over CDP?
pixelstacka day ago
judging from their documentation looks like promised increase only achievable with their main product
tengkahweea day ago
Would you recommend to use this over agent-browser for general agent-based validation work? Any performance benefit?
throw0317201920 hours ago
Can this be used for browser automation on customer computers? The only glaring issue I see is the api tokens are exposed for LLMs.
sixothree19 hours ago
Where would the control come from? Software installed on the client's computer, or software installed connecting to an AI agent, or something else, something more external, something more interactive?
throw0317201918 hours ago
Yes, we install a small piece of software on their computers because we also separately control GUI of legacy windows apps. But we also need to control web based apps as well.
bensyversona day ago
If your needs are simpler, I created a tiny headless WebKit browser specifically for agents called Sleepy Hollow [0]
skybriana day ago
What would be the Linux equivalent?
bensyverson20 hours ago
WebKit is available on Linux, just not Apple’s wrapper. It would certainly be possible to give Sleepy a Linux backend if you’re motivated!
noir_lorda day ago
I love the name.
cl6852 days ago
what did you lose compared to CDP (e.g. cross-origin iframes, downloads running in envs where you can't load extensions)?
wittydeveloperop2 days ago
It still uses CDP but communicates from an extension within the browser instead of a script running in a separate runtime or, worse, in a separate region.
youngtaffa day ago
Are you using CDP over web sockets or via a pipe?
yreada day ago
Is there something like this for cypress?
mgrandl3 hours ago
I think what they are suggesting is that this would replace playwright/cypress in favor of stagehand+test runner (like vitest or whatever you are already using)
ishankunam2 days ago
seems really cool! although, one question i have is why not keep agent() alongside the new primatives? it seems v4 removed agent() entirely rather than offering it with all of act(), observe(), extract().
wittydeveloperop2 days ago
We removed agent because so many great harnesses are available in the ecosystem. Instead of keeping it, we decided to make Stagehand v4 better integrated with popular harnesses, both at the Coding Agent level (Codex, Claude Code) and frameworks level (Eve, Deep Agents, Mastra, etc)
dot_louis2 days ago
Do I need to pay for Browserbase to use this?
wittydeveloperop2 days ago
Nope, Stagehand is open-source and works with local browsers by default.
greenlight_dev2 days ago
[flagged]
alyssamaru2 days ago
How much does the harness really matter for evals?
wittydeveloperop2 days ago
A lot, especially for performance. That's why we built our own benchmarks that account for both the model and the harness. For example, with Claude Opus 5, the accuracy gap can be up to 3% and performance up to 200ms, depending on whether you're using Deep Agents, Eve, or Fx.
More details here: https://www.stagehand.dev/evals
cl6852 days ago
lowk why not just do astra computer use
smpandya2 days ago
I tried this myself - my conclusion was the overhead of parsing a screenshot, generating an action, and being limited to headful mode is much less efficient than reading accessibility trees & generating CDP commands.
basically, browser automation is a closer-to-the-metal abstraction than computer use, allows more flexibility, and ends up being much cheaper at scale!
vishalanton2 days ago
Astra with computer use seems to burn a ton of tokens though. Stagehand seems more token efficient.
ChemSpidera day ago
If agents need to run on the desktop or logged into a user's real browser, the alternative would be Ui.Vision MCP. But stagehand is designed for backend use, so apples and oranges.
polski-ga day ago
Money?
alikhater3000019 hours ago
[flagged]
hellobuddy9a day ago
[dead]
shashanoida day ago
no matter how much faster you make.. playwright is playwright. Dead bot giveaway.
swingboya day ago
A lot of folks use Playwright for UI testing.