Ask an agent to check something on a website and most tools spin up a clean browser with zero cookies. Playwright and friends drive a browser they launched, with a profile of their own. MCP browser bridges need an MCP-capable client and a configured server. Either way you start every session logged out.

chrome-bridge takes the other road: it drives the Chrome you are already logged into. A tiny unpacked extension talks over WebSocket to a local zero-dependency Node server, and any agent that can run a shell command can drive the browser:

node cli.mjs snap localhost:8082         # compact a11y snapshot with element refs
node cli.mjs click localhost:8082 @e4    # click by ref
node cli.mjs fill localhost:8082 @e2 "hello@example.com"

A snap is the whole page as a compact text tree with refs you act on, roughly 10x cheaper on tokens than a screenshot:

table "Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit" @e1
  link "Hacker News" @e5
  link "new" @e6
  link "submit" @e12
  link "login" @e13

A few things that make it pleasant to live with:

• refs survive re-snaps, so the agent re-checks with --diff instead of re-reading the whole page
• driven tabs get a purple pill that narrates what the agent is doing right now, plus a live command feed in your terminal
• multiple Chrome profiles are supported, and it refuses to guess which one you meant
• works with Claude Code, Cursor, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, or a plain script hitting the local HTTP endpoint, no MCP setup

Setup is one paste into your agent plus one click to load the extension (Chrome requires that click). MIT licensed, zero dependencies, Node >= 18.

Repo and full agent manual: https://github.com/siropkin/chrome-bridge

Feedback welcome, especially on token cost of the snapshots against real workloads.