firecrawl-browser

firecrawl browser

Cloud Chromium sessions in Firecrawl's remote sandboxed environment. Interact with pages that require clicks, form fills, pagination, or login.

When to use

• Content requires interaction: clicks, form fills, pagination, login
• scrape failed because content is behind JavaScript interaction
• You need to navigate a multi-step flow
• Last resort in the workflow escalation pattern: search → scrape → map → crawl → browser
• Never use browser for web searches — use search instead

Quick start

# Typical browser workflow
firecrawl browser "open <url>"
firecrawl browser "snapshot -i"                       # see interactive elements with @ref IDs
firecrawl browser "click @e5"                         # interact with elements
firecrawl browser "fill @e3 'search query'"           # fill form fields
firecrawl browser "scrape" -o .firecrawl/page.md      # extract content
firecrawl browser close

Shorthand auto-launches a session if none exists — no setup required.

Commands

Command	Description
open <url>	Navigate to a URL
snapshot -i	Get interactive elements with @ref IDs
screenshot	Capture a PNG screenshot
click <@ref>	Click an element by ref
type <@ref> <text>	Type into an element
fill <@ref> <text>	Fill a form field (clears first)
scrape	Extract page content as markdown
scroll <direction>	Scroll up/down/left/right
wait <seconds>	Wait for a duration
eval <js>	Evaluate JavaScript on the page

Session management: launch-session --ttl 600, list, close

Options

Option	Description
--ttl <seconds>	Session time-to-live
--ttl-inactivity <seconds>	Inactivity timeout
--session <id>	Use a specific session ID
--profile <name>	Use a named profile (persists state)
--no-save-changes	Read-only reconnect (don't write to session state)
-o, --output <path>	Output file path

Profiles

Profiles survive close and can be reconnected by name. Use them for login-then-work flows:

# Session 1: Login and save state
firecrawl browser launch-session --profile my-app
firecrawl browser "open https://app.example.com/login"
firecrawl browser "snapshot -i"
firecrawl browser "fill @e3 'user@example.com'"
firecrawl browser "click @e7"
firecrawl browser "wait 2"
firecrawl browser close

# Session 2: Come back authenticated
firecrawl browser launch-session --profile my-app
firecrawl browser "open https://app.example.com/dashboard"
firecrawl browser "scrape" -o .firecrawl/dashboard.md
firecrawl browser close

Read-only reconnect (no writes to session state):

firecrawl browser launch-session --profile my-app --no-save-changes

Shorthand with profile:

firecrawl browser --profile my-app "open https://example.com"

Tips

• If you get forbidden errors, the session may have expired — create a new one.
• For parallel browser work, launch separate sessions and operate them via --session <id>.
• Always close sessions when done to free resources.

See also

• firecrawl-scrape — try scrape first, escalate to browser only when needed
• firecrawl-search — for web searches (never use browser for searching)
• firecrawl-agent — AI-powered extraction (less manual control)