I built barebrowse: give a local-model agent a browser without Playwright — pruned ARIA snapshots instead of raw HTML (far fewer tokens)

Author here, sharing something I built. If you run agents on a local model, feeding a whole page as raw HTML burns your context fast. barebrowse turns a URL into a pruned ARIA snapshot — the semantic tree with nav/ads/boilerplate stripped — so each page is a fraction of the tokens. Useful when the context window is your bottleneck.

• No Playwright / bundled Chromium — it drives a browser you already have (Chrome/Brave/Edge/Chromium) directly over CDP.
• Pruned ARIA snapshot instead of raw HTML/DOM — far fewer tokens per page for the model to read.
• Reuses cookies from your real browser profile, so logged-in pages just work (no login scripting).
• Vanilla JS, ES modules, Node 22+, two tiny deps. Ships an MCP server + CLI, so it drops into local agent setups.

MIT, open source. Repo: https://github.com/hamr0/barebrowse — happy to take feedback or feature requests.