Agweb Is a WebKit Browser for Coding Agents That Never Takes Focus

Agweb, a macOS browser that coding agents drive from the shell, reached 183 GitHub stars with 163 commits behind it by November 15, 2026, with a README claim that five idle pages use 590 MB where Playwright's Chrome uses 1.6 GB.

The author, who goes by paul-nameless on GitHub, built it for one annoyance. Per the README, Playwright's Chrome windows kept stealing keyboard focus while an agent worked, and some sites blocked headless browsers outright.

How Agweb works

Agweb is built on WebKit, Safari's engine, and runs as one window that "never takes focus". An agent controls it with an agweb command modeled on playwright-cli. It needs macOS 26 or later, and building from source needs Xcode 26 or later. The licence is MIT, and it bundles Defuddle, also MIT, for its text command.

Each agent gets a workspace, passed as -w, with its own tabs grouped in a sidebar, and a dashboard on ⌘D shows every tab live. Logins live in named profiles passed as -p, and several agents can use one profile at once. Snapshots give each page element a reference, and snapshot --diff and find return only what changed. Clicks and keystrokes are native macOS events, and video-start records a tab to MP4.

Install is a download of Agweb.dmg from the releases page, then a Help menu entry that installs the command-line tool and an agent skill.

The memory figure is the author's own

The README's headline number comes from the author's Mac. Idle tabs are throttled and then suspended, and five idle pages come to 590 MB against 1.6 GB for Playwright Chrome.

Setup	Five idle pages, per the README
Agweb	590 MB
Playwright Chrome	1.6 GB

1. Agweb590 MB
2. Playwright Chrome1600 MB

Source: paul-nameless/agweb README, accessed 2026-11-15; 1.6 GB entered as 1,600 MB

The README gives no machine model, page list or method, and no outside party is named as having repeated it. Treat it as a design goal. Playwright has its own agent tool: Microsoft's Playwright CLI documentation describes a daemon design with "persistent browser process means no startup cost per command", sessions with separate state, and support for Chrome, Firefox, WebKit and Edge. Its default mode is headless.

What Agweb gives up

The README's own Limits section is short and candid. Agweb is WebKit only, so Playwright and Chrome extensions cannot attach and "Chrome-only sites may misbehave". The route command mocks only fetch and XHR, and requests lists images, scripts and styles by URL only. The ad blocker cannot run uBlock's scripts, so some ads get through. For anything it cannot do, the README tells users to use Playwright.

Two security details matter more than the memory figure. The fill --secret-cmd option is meant to keep passwords out of the agent's replies, and the README says they "stay out of the transcript". That is a claim about transcripts, not a guarantee about what the agent can do with an authenticated session. Any agent using a shared profile can act inside that profile's logins, so running several agents on one profile means all of them hold the same sessions.

The ad blocker also downloads filter lists every 4 days, so the app makes network requests on its own schedule. The README describes no security audit or threat model.

Like Alibaba's OpenCodeReview and the Lonewolf XMPP server, it is an open-source project whose main documentation is its README. For a team already running Playwright in CI, Agweb changes nothing: it is macOS only and cannot host Chrome extensions. For one person running three agents on a Mac laptop, the focus-stealing problem is the thing it fixes, and the ask command hands a tab to a human for logins, MFA or CAPTCHAs.