Browser use

Agents with Computer Use enabled can drive a real browser inside their sandboxed cloud environment — opening web apps, exercising flows, filling forms, and verifying what renders on screen. Every Computer Use environment includes a browser out of the box, so browser-based tasks work without any changes to your environment configuration.

The bundled browser

Computer Use environments ship with a bundled Chromium browser that runs on any environment base image — you don’t need to install Chrome, Firefox, or any browser dependencies yourself.

• Available as chromium - The browser is on the agent’s PATH as chromium, and the CHROMIUM_BIN and BROWSER environment variables point to it.
• Your own browser wins - If your environment’s base image already provides a browser, the agent uses that instead of the bundled one.

Two ways to drive the browser

Agents can interact with the browser in two complementary ways, and choose the right one for each task:

• Visual interaction - The agent takes screenshots, then clicks, types, and scrolls like a person would. This is the right mode for verifying what a user actually sees: layout, styling, visual regressions, and rendering issues.
• Scripted control with Playwright - Computer Use environments also bundle the Playwright CLI (playwright-cli), which lets the agent drive the browser through shell commands — navigating to URLs, clicking elements, filling forms, and reading page content — without taking a screenshot for every step. Scripted control is faster and more token-efficient for functional flows, like stepping through a multi-page form or asserting that an element exists.

You don’t need to tell the agent which mode to use, but you can steer it in your prompt — for example, “verify the layout visually” or “use Playwright to step through the signup flow.”

The bundled Playwright CLI drives the bundled Chromium rather than downloading its own browser build, so it works on base images that don’t provide Playwright’s system dependencies.

Attaching to a running browser

For advanced workflows, the agent can attach the Playwright CLI to a browser it launched manually with a Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) endpoint:

chromium --remote-debugging-port=9222
playwright-cli attach --cdp=http://localhost:9222

This is useful when a task needs to set up specific browser state (for example, launching with custom flags) before scripted control takes over.

Caution

Browsing the open internet is where Computer Use risks are highest. Prefer non-root containers, which let Chromium run its own process sandbox properly, and consider restricting your environment’s internet access to an allowlist of known-safe domains. See the security considerations for Computer Use.

Example workflows

• Test a web app end-to-end - “Start the dev server, then walk through the checkout flow in the browser and verify each step works.”
• Verify a UI change visually - “Open the settings page and confirm the new toggle renders correctly in both light and dark mode.”
• Automate a web task - “Fill out the staging signup form with test data and confirm the verification email screen appears.”

Related pages

• Computer Use - Control Computer Use and understand how the sandbox works.
• Testing and recordings - Record browser sessions as annotated videos for review.
• Environments - Configure the cloud environment your agents run in.