Added to compare browser-use against us with the BROWSER held constant, and the
result is that it cannot be held constant, which is worth writing down.
What works: with the port exposed, browser-use attaches, sees the browser cards
(they are CDP targets of type 'webview'), navigates one, and completes a task that
verifies independently. Cards persist across restarts because they live in the saved
dashboard layout, so there is something to attach to.
What does not: browser-use's screenshot path cannot capture a webview and falls back
to the app's own 'page' target -- 49 fallbacks in 49 agent steps, i.e. it drove the
web page while LOOKING at the OpenSwarm UI for every single step. A comparison run
that way handicaps the rival for an infrastructural reason and measures neither
agent, so the shared-browser numbers are not publishable as a fair head-to-head.
Two hazards found the hard way, both worth knowing before anyone repeats this:
- browser-use filters CDP targets to page/tab, so 'webview' is invisible to it, and
Electron refuses Target.createTarget ("Not supported") so it cannot open its own.
Pointed at Electron unrestricted it therefore grabs the app's page target and
navigates the OpenSwarm UI away, killing the renderer: the next sweep failed
infra_no_renderer 1/1 because of exactly that.
- An external agent must never be allowed to kill the shared session. Doing so after
trial 1 made trials 2-15 fail ConnectError, which a naive summary published as
"browser-use REACH 4/15" -- ten rows of my own teardown scored against the agent.
Off by default: an open debugging port is a local attack surface, and this only
exists for measurement.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
