Playwright MCP

Playwright

Microsoft's official MCP — LLM controls your local Chromium / Firefox / WebKit through the accessibility tree. More accurate than vision-on-screenshot. The go-to for form-filling, e2e flows, and web scraping.

No token5-min install

Why client-side

Browsers are stateful (cookies, login sessions, tab history). A hub-shared instance would let users see each other's logged-in state — non-starter. The only safe path is local install where your Claude Desktop drives the browser directly via stdio.

Prerequisites

Node.js ≥ 18 (recommend nvm)
MCP-capable client: Claude Desktop / Cursor / Continue / Cline / etc.
macOS / Linux / Windows all supported

Install

Claude Desktop (macOS)

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "playwright": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@playwright/mcp@latest"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor

{
  "name": "playwright",
  "command": "npx -y @playwright/mcp@latest"
}

Full install doc (GitHub)

First run

Try this prompt

Open example.com and take a full-page screenshot

Common tools

browser_navigate(url) — load a page
browser_snapshot() — accessibility-tree dump of the current page (replaces screenshot for most tasks)
browser_click(ref) — click an element
browser_type(ref, text) — type into an input
browser_take_screenshot() — actual screenshot (for vision models)

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Fix
npx hangs on first run	Playwright downloads ~300 MB of browsers on first install. Wait.
macOS: 'unverified developer'	System Settings → Privacy & Security → Allow
Tools don't show up	Fully quit Claude Desktop (cmd+Q) and reopen. Validate the JSON.
Want persistent login sessions	Add --user-data-dir /Users/yourname/.playwright-profile to args