Newshot Browsers are built for people. Agents can use them, but they don't quite fit, so we built agents a browser of their own.
Two weeks ago, we opened the BrowserDo MCP + Embiody Browser 0.9 preview to closed beta testers. Five minor releases later, I'm thrilled to announce that it's now in public beta, open to everyone!
Embiody is a browser designed for people and AI agents to use together. Our team calls this "human-AI co-driving": you and the AI driving the same browser. You could also say it's built specifically for agents, since agents need to work alongside people anyway.
The tabs your agent opens keep running at full speed in the background while you carry on using your computer. When the agent needs you to sign in or pay, it hands the tab over to you. It works the other way too: if you're halfway through something, you can hand it off to the agent, and it picks up seamlessly.
Why build a browser like this? Isn't Chrome good enough?
Agents run into quite a few problems in Chrome. The article I wrote a couple of days ago gives you a sense of it: Claude in Chrome dragging its feet in background tabs, playing dead, misreading numbers, and Claude itself none the wiser.
That article came down to one point: Chrome was designed for "one person at the screen, looking at one tab at a time." That design has served people well for years, but it isn't how agents work.
A person looks at one tab at a time. An agent has a dozen or more to manage.
When a person walks away, they're gone. An agent, though, is quite likely to get busiest right when you walk away, while it's waiting on a download for you, staying on a support chat, or reading data.
A traditional browser's rules were designed for people. Agents can work with them, but they don't quite fit. The browser's original architecture and the way it's used today have drifted apart. That's a structural problem, and you can't fix it from the outside with browser extensions, Playwright and the like. Those only scratch the surface; the root cause stays.
I've been building browsers for years. This time I wanted to build one that treats agents as first-class users from day one.
The 0.9 preview has quite a few features, so I'll go through them one at a time.
Features
1. AI tabs: full speed in the background, no slacking, no hijacking your screen
This is one of Embiody's defining features, and it's the fix for the agent slacking off in the article I mentioned.
Tabs the agent opens in Embiody keep running at full speed, whether they're sitting behind other tabs, covered by another window, or in a minimized window.
And when it clicks and types, it doesn't pull the browser up in front of you. You write your code; it gets on with its work.
What does this mean for people who use agents every day?
It means you can finally let it work across a dozen tabs at once with peace of mind. You don't have to hand it your screen and sit there waiting, and you don't have to worry that some tab is quietly being slowed down or frozen in the background.
In October we pitted Embiody against Chrome: a countdown ran on the page while the browser window sat completely covered by another window for 7 minutes.
Chrome's countdown ended up nearly 6 minutes behind. Embiody's didn't fall behind at all.
2. Anti-blocking: no more being stopped as a bot
Anyone who's used an automation tool like Playwright knows the drill: go to a shopping site, and nine times out of ten the first thing you see is "Please verify you're not a robot."
Why does the site stop it but not you?
Because as far as the site can tell, it's an automated program browsing, not a person.
Embiody is just the browser on your own computer, and the agent works in it on your behalf, so the site sees it exactly as it sees you. Nor should it be blocked in the first place: it's your partner at the keyboard, an extension of you.
We gave both the same task, at the same moment, on four sites: Walmart, Target, adidas and realtor.com. Playwright MCP was stopped at the bot check on every one; Embiody went straight in.
There's a side benefit too: once you've signed in to a site in Embiody, the agent can use it from then on without signing in again.
If you'd like to bring your Chrome sign-ins over, let us know too. If enough people want it, we should be able to deliver it soon.
3. Sees the page right, clicks the right thing
When an agent clicks the wrong thing, it often isn't being dumb. Something else on the page is in the way.
Front-end developers know the story: an ad, a popup, a cookie notice or a transparent overlay can have a higher z-index than the button, which means it's sitting on top of it.
The agent thinks it's clicking "Add to cart," but the click lands on whatever is covering it.
What Embiody shows the agent is generated for the model straight from the engine's rendering layer, and it contains only what the agent can actually click.
On The New York Times site, a cookie banner was covering a button. Playwright MCP clicked and nothing happened; the agent on Embiody closed the banner first, then clicked the button.
It can also read and click forms embedded in frames from other sites, such as payment and sign-in forms. And it clicks precisely across multiple monitors, system display scaling and page zoom.
4. Inspectable: see what it's doing at any time
When an agent works in the background, the most unnerving question is: what is it actually up to?
Agents using tools like AgentBrowser or Playwright usually run the browser headless, meaning no window at all, so you have no idea what they're doing.
Embiody has a headless mode too: the window is hidden and stays off your screen while the agent keeps working, but there's an icon in the system tray. Click it whenever you want to look and the window appears; an open window can be tucked back into the tray with one click as well.
In the window, any tab the agent is controlling carries a small badge. Click it and you'll see a virtual cursor moving across the page, with a highlighted border around the edges.
Watch when you feel like it; when you don't, let it get on with things. It's a lot like looking over a coworker's shoulder, except this one won't get annoyed with you.
图表：The agent's tab carries a badge. Click it to watch the agent's cursor move.
5. Shareable: you and the agent take turns on the same tab
This one's my personal favorite.
An agent can handle most of the work, but signing in, captchas, payments and file uploads are things it either can't do or you shouldn't let it do.
Until now, at that point you had to copy the link into your own browser, finish there, then find some way to hand things back, and the agent often had to start from scratch.
In Embiody, the agent fills in the form and hands the tab to you. You enter the captcha or complete the payment, hand the tab back, and it picks up where you left off.
It works in both directions: if you touch a tab the agent is using, Embiody asks whether you want to take over; if the agent wants to touch your tab, it asks you first.
It's like pair programming: you can split up or work side by side, and each of you knows when to step in.
6. Saves tokens, and time
Agents are billed by the token, so how much does reading one page cost?
Embiody tidies up the whole page before handing it over: the text on the page, plus every element the agent can act on, each with a number.
Put more simply, instead of handing it the whole manual, Embiody gives it a single page: a numbered list of buttons, plus the information that matters.
In November we compared full-page reads on Wikipedia, GitHub, CNN, ESPN and Apple's website. Embiody used less than half the tokens of Playwright MCP or Chrome DevTools MCP, and the agent can also read just what's currently on screen.
7. Combos: quicker, more efficient, lighter on tokens
Combos are the coolest feature of the lot. Clicking, typing some text, pressing Enter: each step used to be a separate call with its own wait for a result. In Embiody they can all go in a single call, and the updated page comes back along with it.
That saves time, and because the agent no longer re-reads the page after every step, it cuts a big chunk off total token use as well.
In the demo the agent fills in 4 form fields in 2.5 seconds. That's real time, not sped up.
图表：Real time, not sped up: the agent fills in 4 form fields in 2.5 seconds.
8. Reads the page itself, not a summary of it
Some of you might ask: Claude Code's built-in WebFetch works pretty well, so why switch?
Because what it returns is another model's summary, which often drops the very information you were after, and many pages built by scripts it can't read at all.
We tried it on a search results page from JB Hi-Fi, an Australian electronics retailer. WebFetch came back with 0 products; BrowserDo read all 18.
BrowserDo returns the page's own text, including pages built by scripts and sites you're signed in to, so it can replace WebFetch outright.
图表：Same search page: WebFetch reads 0 products, BrowserDo reads all 18.
9. Sees everything: browser popups and bubbles don't trip it up
Apart from the web page, the browser itself pops things up too: the permission prompt when a site wants your location, a request to use your camera, the right-click menu, "Are you sure you want to leave this page?", alert boxes from the page, and so on.
None of these are part of the page, so tools that can only read the page, like Claude in Chrome and Playwright, can't see them. The agent gets stuck without even knowing what it's stuck on. When an agent uses BrowserDo·Embiody, it can see and act on all of them.
The McDonald's store locator asks for your location. Playwright MCP can't see the prompt; the agent in Embiody saw it and chose "Allow this time."
10. Quick to follow new Chromium versions
Back when we built CoolNovo (originally ChromePlus), it was the quickest to move to each new Chromium base version. That experience means we can update promptly now too, so you get the latest Chrome features and security.
Version 0.9 is based on Chromium 156.
How to install it, and what it costs
For now, Embiody runs only on Windows 10 and 11. BrowserDo needs Node.js 20 or later; if you don't have it, run winget install OpenJS.NodeJS.LTS and restart your agent app.
As for what we build next, we want to keep a habit from our CoolNovo days: let what users are asking for decide the order.
The same goes for whether to make Mac and Linux versions. We want to hear what you really need, and if enough people want them, we expect to have them out quickly.
Agents drive the Embiody browser through BrowserDo, our open-source MCP server. Any agent that can install MCP tools can install BrowserDo·Embiody, including Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor, Copilot in VS Code, Gemini CLI, WorkBuddy, Doubao Work, QwenWork, TRAE and more.
Most agents can install it if you simply tell them: "Find BrowserDo MCP and install it." If that doesn't work, you can install it manually.
In Claude Code, for example, it takes a single command:
claude mcp add browserdo -- npx -y browserdo-mcp
The first time it runs, BrowserDo installs the browser itself, so there's nothing else to download.
BrowserDo·Embiody is free and needs no account, and we don't collect your browsing history or page content.
Wrapping up
This is the 0.9 preview, so there's no doubt plenty still to improve.
If you use agents to get work done on Windows, give it a try. If something doesn't work well or is missing, tell me on r/Embiody or GitHub Discussions. I read every single post.
In the AI era, people and agents sharing one browser is where things are heading.
Browsers shouldn't be designed only for the person in front of the screen anymore.
They should make room for the agent doing the work for you, too.
Website: https://embiody.com/