🦁 Safari MCP

The browser for your coding agent.

Your real Safari, logged in — no Chrome, no heat, no headless.

Install in VS Code · VS Code Insiders · Install in Cursor

97 tools · No Chrome/Puppeteer/Playwright needed · ~5ms per command · 60% less CPU than Chrome

Quick Start · All 97 Tools · Examples · Why Safari MCP? · Architecture · Changelog

❌ Without Safari MCP

Your AI agent needs to browse. So it either:

• Spins up Chromium via Playwright — with no logins, no cookies, no sessions
• Uses Chrome DevTools MCP — and melts your fan running a second browser
• Relies on headless scrapers — blocked by Cloudflare, reCAPTCHA, and bot detection

✅ With Safari MCP

Your AI drives the Safari you're already logged into — Gmail, GitHub, Ahrefs, Slack, banking.

Native WebKit. ~60% less CPU. Background operation. 97 tools. One npx command. macOS only.

📰 Featured on freeCodeCamp: How to Connect Your AI Coding Agent to a Browser on macOS · HackerNoon: Reverse-Engineering React, Shadow DOM, and CSP

🍎 Apple shipped an official Safari MCP (July 2026 — Safari Technology Preview 247+ and the Safari 27 beta). It's built on safaridriver for isolated debugging sessions. safari-mcp drives the real Safari you're already logged into — on the stable Safari that ships with macOS today, with 97 tools. See the full comparison below.

Highlights

• 97 tools — navigation, clicks, forms, screenshots, network, storage, accessibility, and more
• Zero heat — native WebKit on Apple Silicon, ~60% less CPU than Chrome
• Your real browser — keeps all logins, cookies, sessions (Gmail, GitHub, Ahrefs, etc.)
• Background operation — Safari stays in the background, no window stealing
• No browser dependencies — no Puppeteer, no Playwright, no WebDriver, no Chrome
• Persistent process — reuses a single osascript process (~5ms per command vs ~80ms)
• Framework-compatible — React, Vue, Angular, Svelte form filling via native setters

In users' own words

Not solicited testimonials — quotes lifted from the public issue tracker, each linked to the thread it came from.

"I run multiple Pi sessions/subagents against my normal Safari profile in parallel. Sharing its cookies and logins is intentional." — @maxim, on running concurrent agents against a real browser

"The server has a deliberate tab-ownership model … the code is careful about this, and for the default case that's the right safety posture." — @turner-moore, on why the guards refuse to touch your tabs

"Direct local validation from the package: Safari MCP doctor 6/6." — @jrepp, who found and fixed a queue-alignment bug in the focus helper

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• macOS (any version with Safari)
• Node.js 20+
• Safari → Settings → Advanced → Show features for web developers ✓
• Safari → Develop → Allow JavaScript from Apple Events ✓

Install (one command)

npx safari-mcp

That's it — no global install needed. Or install permanently:

npm install -g safari-mcp

Configure your MCP client

All clients run Safari MCP the same way — npx safari-mcp. Pick your editor:

claude mcp add safari -- npx safari-mcp

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

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

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

{
  "servers": {
    "safari": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["safari-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

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

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

mcpServers:
  - name: safari
    command: npx
    args:
      - safari-mcp

extensions:
  safari:
    name: safari
    type: stdio
    cmd: npx
    args:
      - safari-mcp
    enabled: true

{
  "context_servers": {
    "safari": {
      "command": {
        "path": "npx",
        "args": ["safari-mcp"]
      }
    }
  }
}

brew install achiya-automation/tap/safari-mcp

git clone https://github.com/achiya-automation/safari-mcp.git
cd safari-mcp && npm install

Usage Workflow

The recommended pattern for AI agents using Safari MCP:

1. safari_snapshot        → Get page state (accessibility tree)
2. safari_click/fill/...  → Interact with elements by ref
3. safari_snapshot        → Verify the result

Element targeting — tools accept multiple targeting strategies:

Tip: Start with safari_snapshot to get element refs, then use refs for precise targeting. This is faster and more reliable than CSS selectors.

Running several agents at once

Multiple agents or subagents driving one Safari at the same time will fight over the active tab — unless you run them against a shared HTTP daemon instead of one process per client:

SAFARI_MCP_HTTP=1 SAFARI_MCP_HTTP_PORT=9225 npx safari-mcp

Then point every client at it:

{ "mcpServers": { "safari-mcp": { "type": "http", "url": "http://127.0.0.1:9225/mcp" } } }

One daemon, many sessions — and each session gets its own tab state. The server keys activeTabIndex, the ownership flag and a unique tab marker off the MCP session id, so session A physically cannot read or steer session B's tab.

Two properties make this safe rather than merely tidy:

• Tab identity is a marker, not an index. Each session stamps a unique id into the page it opens, so ownership survives navigation and survives the user reordering or closing other tabs. An index alone would silently drift onto the wrong tab.

• It fails closed. If a session's marked tab can't be re-found, every tool refuses instead of falling back to whatever tab is in front — because that tab is usually yours:

  Code

  Copy

  Tab tracking lost — refusing to fall back to "current tab of window"
  (would target the user's active tab). Call safari_new_tab to reopen.