webcontrol-mcp

Let Claude control any website — open pages, click, fill forms, grab text and screenshots. Faster than playwright-mcp.

I'm a systems engineer and I built this to let Claude drive my test sites: spin up a staging server, point the model at it, and let it click through the flows I would otherwise check by hand. It speaks plain Model Context Protocol over stdio, so it drops straight into Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP client.

Why another browser MCP?

Most browser-control MCPs spin up heavyweight automation stacks with long cold-start times. webcontrol-mcp is a single small Node process with five focused tools, lazy-loads Playwright, and starts in well under a second. On Windows, the optional native helper (below) makes screenshots up to 5x faster.

Quickstart

npx webcontrol-mcp

Or install globally:

npm install -g webcontrol-mcp
webcontrol-mcp

First run on a fresh machine: install the Chromium browser once with npx playwright install chromium.

Tools

Tool	Description
open_page	Open a URL and wait for it to load. Returns the page title.
click	Click an element by CSS selector.
fill	Type text into an input field.
screenshot	Capture the current page as PNG.
get_text	Read visible text from the page or a selected element.

Claude Desktop config

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "webcontrol": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "webcontrol-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor config

Add to .cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "webcontrol": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "webcontrol-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Optional: native helper (Windows)

On Windows you can install a small native capture driver that speeds up screenshots up to 5x:

1. Download helper-setup.exe from the v1.0.0 release.
2. Run it. If Windows SmartScreen shows a warning (the binary isn't broadly distributed yet), choose More info → Run anyway.
3. Restart webcontrol-mcp.

The helper is entirely optional — the MCP server works fine without it (pure-Node screenshots are just slower). macOS and Linux users can ignore it completely.

Troubleshooting

• Playwright is not installed — run npm install in the package directory, or install globally.
• Could not launch Chromium — run npx playwright install chromium once to download the browser.
• Port/firewall prompts — the server drives a local headless Chromium; no inbound ports are needed.

License

MIT