CBrowser — Cognitive Browser Automation

The browser automation that thinks like your users. 122 MCP tools. 25 cognitive traits. 11 disability personas. The only framework that predicts when users give up.

npm install cbrowser
npx cbrowser cognitive-effort --url "https://your-site.com" --persona first-timer

5-Minute Quickstart

Get from zero to your first cognitive insight in 3 commands:

# 1. Install CBrowser
npm install cbrowser

# 2. Install the browser engine (~150MB)
npx playwright install chromium

# 3. Run your first cognitive audit
npx cbrowser cognitive-effort --url "https://your-site.com" --persona first-timer

What you get: A cognitive transport score (0-1), abandonment risk percentage, and the UX bottleneck — in under 30 seconds.

No API key needed for basic commands (navigate, screenshot, click, extract, explore). Cognitive journeys require an Anthropic API key:

npx cbrowser config set-api-key <your-anthropic-key>

Check your environment: Run npx cbrowser doctor to verify everything is set up correctly.

Accessibility: CBrowser supports --no-color (or NO_COLOR env var), --plain (no emoji/decorations), and --json-output (structured JSON) for screen readers, CI pipelines, and scripting.

Table of Contents

• 5-Minute Quickstart
• Cognitive Transport Chain
• Visual Overlays & Attention Analysis
• AI Friendliness Suite
• Cognitive User Simulation
• Accessibility Empathy Testing
• Constitutional AI Safety
• Site Knowledge System
• Natural Language Testing
• Visual Testing
• Competitive UX Benchmark
• Geo Proxy
• MCP Server Integration
• CI/CD Integration
• API Reference
• Configuration
• Enterprise Edition
• Contributing
• License

Cognitive Transport Chain

The eight-layer Sequential Transport Chain computes exactly how hard your page is for any persona - and predicts whether they'll abandon. Each layer answers one question about the visitor:

The chain is sequential because attention is a budget, not a checklist. Each layer's cost is paid from whatever the layers before it left behind: a visitor who burned working memory just finding the button has less left for the form, and a persona who arrives at your pricing table already frustrated reads it differently than one who got there clean. That's why a page that exhausts people early scores differently from one that is uniformly hard, and why the bottleneck layer matters more than the average.

Two layers were split out of their neighbors because they fail for different reasons. Motor Procedure is separate from Motor because hitting a target and completing a sequence are different failures - you can land every click and still lose your place halfway through a form. Reading Attention is separate from Readability because decoding text and holding your place in it are different abilities - an ADHD reader typically decodes fine and loses the thread, and a single "reading" score can't say that.

npx cbrowser cognitive-effort --url "https://your-site.com" --persona first-timer
# → CTC: 0.76, abandonment risk: 42%, bottleneck: decision

Returns: total CTC score, per-layer breakdown, bottleneck identification, abandonment risk percentage, and motor accessibility overlay.

Visual Overlays & Attention Analysis

See where users look, what they miss, and whether your CTAs capture attention — per persona:

# Full visual cognitive story — 4 annotated images + narrative
npx cbrowser visual-cognitive-story --url "https://your-site.com" --persona cognitive-adhd

# Attention heatmap — where does this persona look?
npx cbrowser attention-analysis --url "https://your-site.com" --persona first-timer

# Compare how two personas experience the same page
npx cbrowser attention-compare --url "https://your-site.com" --persona-a first-timer --persona-b power-user

Overlays generated:

• Attention heatmap — CIE-Lab saliency on grayscale base (red = high attention)
• Motor accessibility — Green/yellow/red per element by P(hit)
• Attention quality — CTAs green, distractors red, headings blue
• Comparison diff — Blue = persona A attention, red = persona B

Metrics: CTA capture rate, value prop salience, distractor ratio, quality score (0-100), entropy.

AI Friendliness Suite

Five tools to make your site ready for the AI agent era:

npx cbrowser agent-ready-audit "https://your-site.com" --html
npx cbrowser ai-benchmark "https://site-a.com,https://site-b.com"

Cognitive User Simulation

26 research-backed cognitive traits + 10 motivational values model how real users think, struggle, and give up:

See Trait Index for all 25 traits including: Persistence, Resilience, Curiosity, Change Blindness, Anchoring Bias, Time Horizon, Attribution Style, Metacognitive Planning, Procedural Fluency, Transfer Learning, Authority Sensitivity, Emotional Contagion, Mental Model Rigidity, Interrupt Recovery, Reading Tendency, and Site Familiarity.

Full documentation: Research Methodology · Trait Index · Bibliography

17 Built-in Personas

6 general: first-timer, power-user, mobile-user, screen-reader-user, elderly-user, impatient-user

11 accessibility: motor-impairment-tremor, low-vision-magnified, cognitive-adhd, dyslexic-user, deaf-user, elderly-low-vision, color-blind-deuteranopia, autism-spectrum, intellectual-disability, aphasia-receptive, dyscalculia

Values System

Beyond cognitive traits, CBrowser models 10 motivational values from three psychological frameworks:

See Values Framework for full documentation.

Custom Persona Builder

# Interactive questionnaire (8 core traits)
npx cbrowser persona-questionnaire start

# Comprehensive questionnaire (all 25 traits)
npx cbrowser persona-questionnaire start --comprehensive --name "my-tester"

# From a description — AI generates trait values
npx cbrowser persona-create "A 68-year-old retiree who just got their first smartphone"

Abandonment Detection

The simulation stops when a realistic user would give up:

⚠️ ABANDONED after 8 steps
Reason: Patience depleted (0.08) - "This is taking too long..."
Friction points:
  1. Password requirements unclear (step 4)
  2. Form validation error not visible (step 6)

Accessibility Empathy Testing

Simulate how users with disabilities experience your site:

npx cbrowser empathy-audit "https://your-site.com" \
  --goal "complete signup" \
  --disabilities "motor-impairment-tremor" \
  --html

Constitutional AI Safety

AI agents need boundaries. CBrowser classifies every action by risk level:

Site Knowledge System

CBrowser learns your site over time:

• Page Understanding — DOM analysis, page type classification, available affordances
• Site Model Learning — Persistent knowledge graph across sessions
• Cross-Session Profiles — AES-256-GCM encrypted cookie/state profiles
• Goal Decomposition — Sub-goal trees with fallback strategies

Natural Language Testing

# Test: Checkout Flow
go to https://your-site.com/products
click "Add to Cart" button
verify page contains "1 item in cart"
click checkout
fill email with "test@example.com"
click "Place Order"
verify url contains "/confirmation"

npx cbrowser test-suite checkout-test.txt --html

# Auto-repair broken tests
npx cbrowser repair-tests broken-test.txt --auto-apply --verify

Visual Testing

# AI visual regression
npx cbrowser ai-visual capture "https://your-site.com" --name homepage
npx cbrowser ai-visual test "https://staging.your-site.com" homepage --html

# Cross-browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
npx cbrowser cross-browser "https://your-site.com" --html

# Responsive (mobile, tablet, desktop)
npx cbrowser responsive "https://your-site.com" --html

# A/B comparison (staging vs production)
npx cbrowser ab "https://staging.your-site.com" "https://your-site.com" --html

Competitive UX Benchmark

Run identical cognitive journeys across your site and competitors:

npx cbrowser competitive-benchmark \
  --sites "https://your-site.com,https://competitor-a.com,https://competitor-b.com" \
  --goal "sign up for free trial" \
  --persona first-timer \
  --html

Upgrading to 19.0.0

One breaking change: the agent-ready accessibility axis is now agentPerceivability, and three deprecated aliases are removed.

All three replacements have carried identical values since 18.82.0, so if you upgraded within that range you can switch keys before upgrading and take this release with no further change.

The rename is not cosmetic. That axis measures whether a machine can perceive your elements — ARIA present, elements carry text. It is not a WCAG conformance score, and it returned 100 on a page where empathy_audit found two WCAG violations. Both numbers were right; calling one of them "accessibility" was not. Run empathy_audit for conformance, and expect the two to differ.

On input, category: "accessibility" is still accepted and scores identically, so tools that send issues need not change immediately. Tools that read scores do.

Geo Proxy

Test from 10 global regions via residential proxies:

npx cbrowser cognitive-journey \
  --start "https://your-site.com" \
  --persona first-timer \
  --goal "sign up" \
  --geo-region uk

Regions: us-west, us-east, us-central, uk, germany, france, japan, australia, canada, brazil

Geo routing needs your own residential-proxy credentials — the package ships the mechanism and no keys. Set IPROYAL_USERNAME / IPROYAL_PASSWORD, or place a geo-proxy.json at ~/.cbrowser/. Without either, --geo-region fails loudly rather than silently running from your own IP.

A geo-proxy.json may define additional regions; they merge over the ten above.

Corrected 2026-08-11. This section previously advertised 12 regions including india and singapore. Those are not in the shipped defaults and resolve to nothing on a clean install — they existed only in a local config file on one machine. Advertising them was a claim the package could not keep.

MCP Server Integration

CBrowser runs as an MCP server for Claude.ai, Claude Desktop, and Claude Code.

Claude.ai (Easiest — No Install)

Add the MCP connector and optionally install the Claude.ai Skill:

1. Go to Customize → Connectors → "Add custom connector"
2. Paste: https://demo.cbrowser.ai/mcp
3. Download the Claude.ai Skill (.zip) — gives Claude context about tools, pricing, and workflows
4. Go to Customize → Skills → Upload the zip

Note: The Claude.ai Skill is a lightweight knowledge file for the web interface. It is NOT the same as the Claude Code Skill (see below).

Claude Code Skill (CLI — Not for Claude.ai)

For Claude Code terminal users:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alexandriashai/cbrowser/main/scripts/install-skill.sh | bash
npm install -g cbrowser && npx playwright install

The Claude Code Skill is a full CLI integration with workflow routing, TypeScript tools, persistent memory, and constitutional safety. See Skill Installation Guide for details.

Claude Desktop

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cbrowser": {
      "url": "https://demo.cbrowser.ai/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Local MCP Server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cbrowser": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["cbrowser", "mcp-server"]
    }
  }
}

122 MCP Tools

Token Cost & Selective Loading

122 MCP tools consume ~45,000 tokens in LLM context. For cost-sensitive use, load selectively:

import { McpServer } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/server/mcp.js";
import {
  registerNavigationTools,
  registerInteractionTools,
  registerExtractionTools,
} from "cbrowser/mcp-tools";

const server = new McpServer({ name: "my-app", version: "1.0.0" });
const context = { getBrowser: () => browser };

// ~5,000 tokens instead of ~45,000
registerNavigationTools(server, context);
registerInteractionTools(server, context);
registerExtractionTools(server, context);

Categories: navigation, interaction, extraction, assertion, analysis, session, healing, visualTesting, testing, bugAnalysis, personaComparison, cognitive, cognitiveTransport, attention, siteKnowledge, values, performance, audit, browserManagement, security, marketing, remediation, llmsTxt.

CI/CD Integration

GitHub Actions

name: CBrowser Tests
on: [pull_request]

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: alexandriashai/cbrowser@v18
        with:
          test-file: tests/e2e/checkout.txt
          sensitivity: strict

Docker

docker run --rm -v $(pwd)/tests:/work/tests ghcr.io/alexandriashai/cbrowser:latest \
  test-suite tests/checkout.txt --html

API Reference

import { CBrowser } from 'cbrowser';

const browser = new CBrowser({
  headless: true,
  persistent: true,
});

await browser.navigate('https://example.com');

const result = await browser.smartClick('Sign In', {
  maxRetries: 3,
  minConfidence: 0.8,
});

const assertion = await browser.assert("page contains 'Welcome'");
if (!assertion.passed) {
  console.error(assertion.message);
}

await browser.close();

Modular Imports

import { runVisualRegression, runCrossBrowserTest } from 'cbrowser/visual';
import { runNLTestSuite, detectFlakyTests, repairTest } from 'cbrowser/testing';
import { huntBugs, runChaosTest, findElementByIntent } from 'cbrowser/analysis';
import { capturePerformanceBaseline, detectPerformanceRegression } from 'cbrowser/performance';

Configuration

npx cbrowser config set-api-key  # Required for cognitive journeys

Enterprise Edition

CBrowser Enterprise adds:

All 125 MCP tools included with no rate limits.

License

MIT License — Free and open source. See LICENSE.

© 2026 Alexandria Eden · cbrowser.ai · alexandria.shai.eden@gmail.com

Links

• Documentation — Full docs, guides, API reference
• NPM Package
• GitHub
• Issue Tracker
• Roadmap

Research

• Research Methodology — How the 25 traits were selected and validated
• Trait Index — All cognitive traits with citations
• Bibliography — Academic references
• Persona Index — All 17 cognitive + 8 marketing personas