Browser Automation

Qirabot drives the browser through pixels, not the DOM. The AI reads the rendered page like a person does, so it works where selector-based automation breaks: canvas apps, cross-origin iframes, shadow DOM, aggressive A/B-tested layouts, and pages that change faster than your test suite.

You can let Qirabot manage the browser, or bolt it onto the Playwright / Selenium session you already have.

Managed browser

Requires the browser extra: pip install "qirabot[browser]" then qirabot install-browser.

The quickest way to see it run is the CLI — one command, no code:

qirabot browser "Open the top story and summarize the discussion" --url news.ycombinator.com
qirabot browser "..." --headless --viewport 1920x1080
qirabot browser "..." --user-data-dir ~/.qira-profile --channel chrome   # logins survive runs
qirabot browser "..." --cdp-url http://localhost:9222                    # attach to running Chrome

--cdp-url also works with remote pools like browserless.

Log in once, reuse the session

For sites that need an account, set the login up by hand — no AI task, no API key, no tokens spent. open-browser opens the profile in a visible browser; log in, close the window, and every later run that passes the same --user-data-dir starts already signed in:

qirabot open-browser --user-data-dir ~/.qira-profile --url news.ycombinator.com/login
# log in in the window, then close it
qirabot browser "Open the top story and summarize the discussion" --user-data-dir ~/.qira-profile

A profile directory can't be shared by two browsers at once, so close the login window before running tasks. For login walls the AI hits mid-task (captchas, 2FA), see human-in-the-loop.

The same run through the SDK — bot.open() launches Chromium (Playwright under the hood), you never write framework code:

from qirabot import Qirabot

bot = Qirabot()
page = bot.open("https://news.ycombinator.com")

result = bot.ai(page, "Open the top story and summarize the discussion")
print(result.output)

bot.close()

Bolt onto the session you already have

Already running a browser through your own framework? Skip bot.open() and pass your own object as the target — or bind() it once to stop repeating it (bind() is covered in Custom Adapters & Bolt-On):

• Playwright — pass your page; mix your selectors with AI steps freely. Full guide: Playwright + Qirabot.
• Selenium — pass (or bind()) your driver; not an extra, bring your own (pip install qirabot selenium). Full guide: Selenium + Qirabot.
• pytest — AI assertions and AI steps inside your existing suite, with fixtures and CI notes. Full guide: pytest + Qirabot.

One gotcha worth knowing up front: a click can open a new tab, and the returned page is the live one — keep the form page = bot.click(page, ...). Details and the smart go_back behavior are in the API reference.

Notes

• Headless detection: on a display-less box (no DISPLAY), bot.open() and the CLI automatically run headless, with a warning. open-browser is the exception — it errors out instead, since a browser nobody can see is useless for manual login.
• close_tab is Playwright-only; navigate, go_back, press_key (including ctrl+w to close the current tab — reassign the returned page), and scroll all work. See the full per-platform action matrix in the API Reference.