Your AI agents get a real browser

Zeed is plain Chromium under the hood — so Claude Code can drive it over MCP: navigate, click, fill forms, screenshot, run JS, trace performance. Fully local, opt-in, on Linux and macOS.

Set it up in 3 minutes What is Zeed?

Standard Chrome DevTools Protocol · standard MCP · nothing leaves your machine

Three minutes to a driveable browser.

Three steps: install, launch with CDP, register the MCP server.

1. Install Zeed

Arch from the AUR, Ubuntu/Debian via .deb, macOS via Homebrew. Already running Zeed? Skip to step 2. All install options →

Linux:

yay -S zeed-bin

macOS:

brew install --cask efg-technologies/zeed/zeed

2. Launch Zeed in CDP mode (a separate profile)

Zeed is plain Chromium under the hood, so the Chrome DevTools Protocol works as-is. Use a dedicated profile so agent sessions never touch your daily tabs, cookies, or passwords. The port is loopback-only.

Linux:

zeed --remote-debugging-port=9222 \
  --user-data-dir="$HOME/.config/zeed-mcp-profile" \
  --no-first-run &

macOS:

open -na "/Applications/Zeed Browser.app" --args \
  --remote-debugging-port=9222 \
  --user-data-dir="$HOME/.config/zeed-mcp-profile" \
  --no-first-run

3. Register the MCP server in Claude Code

One command, then restart Claude Code. Your agent now has mcp__zeed-browser__* tools — the standard chrome-devtools-mcp toolset (29 tools as of 2026-06).

claude mcp add --scope user zeed-browser -- \
  npx -y chrome-devtools-mcp@latest \
  --browserUrl http://127.0.0.1:9222 --no-usage-statistics

Check the connection any time: curl http://127.0.0.1:9222/json/version
Restart Claude Code after registering — the tools appear as mcp__zeed-browser__*.

29 tools, standard MCP

What your agent can do with it.

Navigate & manage tabs

Open, select, and close pages; navigate URLs; wait for content to appear.

Click, type, fill forms

Click elements, hover, drag, type text, fill whole forms, upload files, handle dialogs.

See the page

Screenshots of the viewport or full page, plus text snapshots of the DOM your agent can actually read.

Run JavaScript

Evaluate scripts in the page context and get structured results back.

Inspect console & network

Read console messages and network requests — enough to debug a frontend without leaving your terminal.

Record performance traces

Start and stop DevTools performance traces, then pull out the insights, including CPU/network emulation.

Tool list per chrome-devtools-mcp as of 2026-06. This drives the browser from outside — it is separate from Zeed’s built-in sidebar agent.

In practice

Three things people actually do.

Verify your change in a real browser

You just edited a component. Ask Claude Code to open your dev server in Zeed, click through the flow, screenshot the result, and read the console for errors — then fix what it finds. End-to-end confirmation without writing a Playwright suite first.

Research that ends up in your files

Have the agent open documentation or comparison pages in Zeed, take text snapshots, and synthesize what it read straight into your notes or code comments — using a real browser session you can watch and interrupt.

A browser for your own agent stack

chrome-devtools-mcp speaks standard MCP, so the same Zeed instance plugs into Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, or your own agent. If your workflow needs eyes and hands on the web, point it at Zeed instead of a headless toy.

Safety design

Local, opt-in, contained.

Remote debugging is powerful, so Zeed treats it the way a security-conscious user would: never on by default, never on your daily profile, never on the network.

Opt-in, per launch

The debug port exists only when you start Zeed with the flag. Your daily profile never opens it.

A profile of its own

~/.config/zeed-mcp-profile keeps agent sessions away from your cookies, logins, and tabs.

Loopback only

Chromium binds CDP to 127.0.0.1 — the port is not reachable from the network.

Honest about the trade-off

CDP has no authentication: any local process can drive a CDP-enabled instance. That is exactly why Zeed keeps it opt-in and on a separate profile — and why you should too. Stop it any time: close the window or pkill the profile.

Done for the day? Stop the MCP instance only:

pkill -f -- "--user-data-dir=$HOME/.config/zeed-mcp-profile"

Questions? See the FAQ or email us.