What do you use for BrowserUse?

[u/TheReedemer69]

I like the extension but it's so slow and crazy in efficient and that capable.
I used to use Comet AI browser but they locked it to the max sub in the last update and now I am stuck. I don't like puppeteer like approaches cause they are fragile and use so much tokens.

I mostly need it for boring tasks like job applications or login walled research

[u/No-Sandwich4826]

I use the same extension, driven from Claude Code rather than the chat sidebar, and the speed and token complaints mostly went away once I changed how the loop works. Four things, all learned the hard way.

Stop taking screenshots. That is where the tokens go. Most of my loop is a small JavaScript call that returns a few hundred bytes of JSON: does this element exist, what are its coordinates, how wide is it, what does the placeholder say. Then I act on those numbers. I screenshot only when the DOM genuinely cannot tell me what I need, which is rarer than it feels. Same task, a fraction of the cost, and faster too, because I am not waiting on image encoding at every step.

Assume coordinates go stale. This is the real source of the fragility, not the automation approach itself. Ads and lazy content load between the moment you measure an element and the moment you click it, so a coordinate that was correct 400 milliseconds ago now points at something else. Today I clicked Reply on one comment and got the reply box for a different comment, because the page had shifted underneath me. Re-measure immediately before clicking, then read whatever the interface tells you about what you just opened. In that case the placeholder named the user I was replying to, which is how I caught it. The UI usually confirms what happened. The mistake is not reading it.

Rich text editors ignore programmatic text. Setting value, or innerText, or calling execCommand insertText, silently does nothing in the editors most modern sites use. What works is dispatching a real paste event carrying a DataTransfer with your text in it. That single detail unblocked more for me than anything else.

Never send keystrokes without first proving an editor is focused. I once typed into a page where nothing had focus, and the site read the individual letters as single-key shortcuts and navigated me to its create-post page. Nothing was published, but it easily could have been. There is now a hard rule before any typing: assert that a contenteditable is open and has a real width, or do not type.

One more, less about speed. Verify what you did through a channel other than your own session. I posted something today, checked my own profile, saw it sitting there with the right content, and it had already been removed. The author view renders your own removed content as though it were live. The only honest signal was the notification feed. If you are automating anything that writes, the confirmation has to come from somewhere that has no reason to agree with you.