I built a prototype using native messaging (the same way apps password managers interact with browsers and drive actions with pure js).
I have a lot of actions done but not full there yet. Essentially the goal is to use a cli or an external desktop app to drive your already logged‑in Chrome profile without navigator.webdriver, or enabling --remote‑debugging‑port. In all my testing never got flagged with captcha/bot protect. The cli can interact with LLMs, local file system(despite opfs this is easier).
Extenion just executes pure js for extraction, navigation. Ive gotten basic google searching, image downloading working. Looking at complex form interactions.
native messaging is a huge headache to set up reliably across all the OSs and (often headless) chrome setups in our experience, that's why we've avoided it.
Just using some remote endpoint message bus service is an easier solution, or something like ElectricSQL/RxDB/Replicache/etc.
We also can't really use in-page JS for much because it's easily detected by bot-blockers, though isolated worlds help in CDP.
I recently had to do a form and just asked claude to
1. Write up the form with the questions styled with tailwind, shadcn, heroui.
2. Wire it up and give me a cloudflare function to write to a KV store
3. Instructions on how to setup above with cloudflare free tier.
It got it in the first shot, took me <3-4mins to copy paste in cloudflare. Been working well so far, the page is also hosted on cloudflare pages and hasnt cost anything so far.
I have a lot of actions done but not full there yet. Essentially the goal is to use a cli or an external desktop app to drive your already logged‑in Chrome profile without navigator.webdriver, or enabling --remote‑debugging‑port. In all my testing never got flagged with captcha/bot protect. The cli can interact with LLMs, local file system(despite opfs this is easier).
CLI(host app) <-> Native messaging daemon <-> Chrome extension
Extenion just executes pure js for extraction, navigation. Ive gotten basic google searching, image downloading working. Looking at complex form interactions.