# PinchTab: High-Performance Browser Automation for AI Agents

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PinchTab is a high-performance browser automation bridge and multi-instance orchestrator, designed to give AI agents direct control over Chrome. Built in Go, it offers advanced stealth injection, real-time dashboards, and token-efficient web interaction. It supports both headless and headed modes, enabling robust and secure automation workflows for various applications.

GitHub: https://github.com/pinchtab/pinchtab
OSRepos URL: https://osrepos.com/repo/pinchtab-pinchtab

## Summary

PinchTab is a high-performance browser automation bridge and multi-instance orchestrator, designed to give AI agents direct control over Chrome. Built in Go, it offers advanced stealth injection, real-time dashboards, and token-efficient web interaction. It supports both headless and headed modes, enabling robust and secure automation workflows for various applications.

## Topics

- browser-automation
- Go
- headless-chrome
- web-scraping
- AI agents
- orchestration
- stealth
- CDP

## Repository Information

Last analyzed by OSRepos: Sun Jun 21 2026 00:07:57 GMT+0100 (Western European Summer Time)
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## Content

## Introduction

PinchTab is a high-performance browser automation bridge and multi-instance orchestrator, specifically designed to empower AI agents with direct control over Chrome. It operates as a standalone HTTP server, providing a token-efficient way for agents to navigate pages, extract structured content, and interact with the DOM without relying on raw HTML or images. Built in Go, PinchTab is a small, self-contained binary that emphasizes a local-first security posture, making it ideal for secure, single-user control while also supporting advanced remote and distributed deployments.

It enables a wide range of applications, from headless and headed navigation for data extraction and testing, to managing multiple isolated Chrome instances for complex distributed automation tasks.

## Installation

Getting started with PinchTab is straightforward. Choose the method that best suits your environment:

**macOS / Linux:**

bash
curl -fsSL https://pinchtab.com/install.sh | bash


**Homebrew (macOS / Linux):**

bash
brew install pinchtab/tap/pinchtab


**npm:**

bash
npm install -g pinchtab


**Docker:**

For containerized environments, you can run PinchTab with Docker:

bash
docker run -d \
  --name pinchtab \
  -p 127.0.0.1:9867:9867 \
  -v pinchtab-data:/data \
  --shm-size=2g \
  pinchtab/pinchtab


For daily local use, it is recommended to install the daemon once to keep PinchTab running in the background:

bash
pinchtab daemon install
pinchtab daemon


## Examples

PinchTab offers both a powerful CLI and a flexible HTTP API for controlling browser instances.

### CLI Usage

**First useful command, auto-starts the local server if needed:**

bash
pinchtab nav https://pinchtab.com --snap


**Recommended for daily local use, install the daemon once:**

bash
pinchtab daemon install
pinchtab daemon


**Control the browser from another terminal:**

bash
# Navigate, starts the server automatically if needed
pinchtab nav https://pinchtab.com

# Get page structure
pinchtab snap -i -c

# Click an element
pinchtab click e5

# Extract text
pinchtab text


### HTTP API Usage

You can also interact directly with the HTTP API:

bash
# Create a profile first (returns profile id)
PROF=$(curl -s -X POST http://localhost:9867/profiles \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name":"work"}' | jq -r '.id')

# Start an instance for that profile (returns instance id)
INST=$(curl -s -X POST http://localhost:9867/instances/start \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "{\"profileId\":\"$PROF\",\"mode\":\"headless\"}" | jq -r '.id')

# Open a tab in that instance
TAB=$(curl -s -X POST http://localhost:9867/instances/$INST/tabs/open \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://pinchtab.com"}' | jq -r '.tabId')

# Get snapshot
curl "http://localhost:9867/tabs/$TAB/snapshot?filter=interactive"

# Click element
curl -X POST "http://localhost:9867/tabs/$TAB/action" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"kind":"click","ref":"e5"}'


## Why Use PinchTab?

PinchTab stands out for its robust feature set and performance optimizations, making it an excellent choice for browser automation, especially for AI agents:

*   **Token Performance:** Highly efficient, extracting text with approximately 800 tokens per page, significantly cheaper than screenshot-based methods.
*   **Headless and Headed Modes:** Supports both invisible headless Chrome for background tasks and visible headed Chrome for interactive workflows.
*   **Persistent Profiles:** Manage browser state, including cookies and history, allowing agents to maintain logged-in sessions across restarts.
*   **Advanced CDP Control:** Offers fine-grained control over Chrome DevTools Protocol.
*   **Multi-instance Orchestration:** Run multiple parallel Chrome processes with isolated profiles, ideal for distributed tasks and testing.
*   **Self-contained Binary:** A small, ~15MB Go binary with no external dependencies, simplifying deployment.
*   **Accessibility-first:** Uses stable element references instead of fragile coordinates for reliable interaction.
*   **ARM64-optimized:** First-class support for ARM64 architectures, including Raspberry Pi.

Benchmarking against other agent-browser solutions shows PinchTab significantly reduces token costs and requests, with cost savings widening for longer workloads.

PinchTab is also committed to privacy, operating as a fully open-source, local-first tool with no telemetry or analytics.

## Links

*   **Official Documentation:** [https://pinchtab.com/docs](https://pinchtab.com/docs)
*   **GitHub Repository:** [https://github.com/pinchtab/pinchtab](https://github.com/pinchtab/pinchtab)