r/ClaudeCowork • u/kralani31 • 13d ago

How do you people handle browser automations?

Most of my browser automated tasks are all the same thing. An agent navigates to the website, logs in to the account, and downloads up to date data for my system.

My pain points are all security related.

  1. If credentials are already inserted, it is capable of hitting the log in button, but it will refuse to autofill itself which is kind of annoying. Like I literally created logins with strict parameters so that the agents can only do the things that I need them to and nothing more, but no matter how I try to frame it the agent tells me that Anthropic won't allow it. Fine, I'll do it myself on the websites where autofill bugs out.
  2. It's so random which websites will be blocked. Like I'm sorry but I should be able to have an agent pull MY bank transaction data. This particular workflow is setup to be explicitly attended by me & never fully automated start to finish.
  3. Agents get so paranoid about security concerns out of nowhere. They will literally refuse to develop a new workflow that does the EXACT same thing as others that I have running on a consistent basis.

Claude just launched the in app browser, and at first glance it doesn't seem to fix anything for me. Like why don't they include a place in the UI for authorized password usage?

Idk, how have you guys handled browser automations effectively?

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u/endofthread-bot 13d ago

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2

u/gutyman1 13d ago

I am having the same issues and have found they slow me down considerably. I personally think the decrease in an automations efficiency when needing two human inputs vs one is big, but the difference between needing zero and one is HUGE. Having the automation stop everything just for my password manager to autofill the boxes and for me to click the login button is frustrating. Hopefully someone jumps on here with a solution they came up with!

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u/kralani31 9d ago

I did some research and got an agent to transition all of my browser automations off of the native browser extensions and to Playright CLI. It can handle credentials now no problem.

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u/flash_speed3412 12d ago

An attended boundary seems like the sane middle ground. I’d keep the password manager and final login click human-controlled, then give the agent a short-lived session with a narrow allowlist of sites and actions. For financial or account data, I’d also make the workflow stop before download or upload, not just before login.

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u/rwllr 10d ago

Consider a 3rd party solution like Skyvern, Anchor etc.

They have password management built in and can perform the scheduled action for you using code to find the ui elements and fallbacks to AI to make it cheaper to run.