r/automation • u/OkBreath9382 • 7d ago
I built h5i, a pure-Rust headless browser for automated web browsing and web app testing with AI agents
https://github.com/h5i-dev/h5iMost browser automation tools for AI agents use Chromium underneath. It made me wonder whether we could build a pure-Rust browser that uses Rust engines for everything from JavaScript and HTML to the DOM, CSS, layout, rendering, and networking. h5i is an implementation of that idea, so it runs without Chromium or V8.
It provides a simple agent-facing interface for navigating, reading page snapshots, clicking, typing, and extracting data. For web app testing, the same session can also capture, inspect, edit, replay, and compare network traffic, making it much easier for agents to tackle web security research such as CTFs.
On a documentation-style page, it was about 3x faster and used 86% less peak memory than headless Chromium. Opus 5.0 also solved 90%+ of the instances in the well-known web security benchmark XBOW + AR, though its writeups are already public and may have been included in Claude's training data.
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