Playwright MCP — Browser control for AI agents through accessibility snapshots

Overview

Playwright MCP runs a browser and exposes it to an MCP client as tools such as browser_navigate, browser_click and browser_type. Every action returns a text snapshot of the page's accessibility tree in which each element carries a short reference (ref=e5); the agent passes that reference back as the target of the next call. No vision model is needed, and the same page structure always produces the same interaction.

Instructions

Installation

The server is an npm package started with npx; nothing is installed globally. The browser is downloaded on first use.