Browser Control MCP: let an agent tidy your own Firefox

If you have dozens of tabs open and want an agent to group them, close the stale ones, or dig an article out of last week’s history, a full automation browser is overkill, and it means handing over your everyday browser. Browser Control MCP takes a narrower route: a local MCP server paired with a Firefox extension that exposes tabs, history and page text, and little else. It had about 330 stars as of 2026-10-06.

What it does

• Tab management: open, close, list and reorder tabs, and create named, colored tab groups.
• History search: read and search browsing history, for example to reopen the AI articles you read in the past week.
• Page reading: read a page’s text and links, or find and highlight text, with your explicit consent per domain.
• Screenshots: capture a tab’s visible area after you authorize that tab with the toolbar button; the grant expires when the tab navigates or closes.

Who it’s for

• Heavy Firefox users whose tab bar never shrinks and who want Claude to sort it out.
• People who want an agent to open search results in their own browser, read them and summarize, without giving it clicks or scripting.

Setup

Install the extension from Firefox Add-ons and copy the secret from its preferences page. Claude Desktop users can install the DXT bundle linked there; for other clients, build from source per the README and add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "browser-control": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/repo/mcp-server/dist/server.js"],
      "env": {
        "EXTENSION_SECRET": "<secret_on_firefox_extension_options_page>",
        "EXTENSION_PORT": "8089"
      }
    }
  }
}

Our take

Tools like Playwright MCP can do anything, which is exactly what makes them uneasy company in a personal browser. This project does less on purpose: no page changes, no clicks, no arbitrary scripts. Content access is gated per domain by the extension manifest, the connection is local-only with a shared secret, and the extension keeps an audit log of tool calls. The cost is clear too. It’s Firefox-only, and it can’t fill forms or act behind a login. The author still calls it experimental, so approve tool calls one by one. Licensed MIT.