🦁 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:

  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.
  

This also drops process count sharply: ~17 node processes for 17 concurrent sessions becomes 1.

SAFARI_PROFILE stays optional — leave it unset and sessions bind to your ordinary Safari windows, cookies and logins intact. Details in docs/http-transport-design.md.

Prefer stdio (one process per agent) over a persistent daemon? That works too — isolation then comes from the process boundary itself. One caveat: if your client multiplexes agents through mcporter, mcporter caches a single MCP client for all of them — whichever transport you pick — so the server never sees distinct sessions and per-session isolation can't engage. mcporter-lanes (a pi extension by @maxim, born out of #76) fixes this upstream: each agent session gets its own daemon dir — and therefore its own safari-mcp — with an idle timeout so processes don't pile up.

Acting on a tab you already have open

By default the server touches only tabs it opened itself. Point it at one of yours and it refuses:

Tab safety: refusing "click" — current tab (https://mail.example.com/inbox) was not
opened by this MCP session. Use safari_new_tab or safari_switch_tab to target your own tab.

That default exists because early versions did click into and close people's tabs. But "read the article I'm looking at" and "fill in the form on my screen" are real, and reopening the page loses the session state that made your tab worth using. Set SAFARI_MCP_ALLOW_USER_TABS=1 and an explicit safari_switch_tab adopts the tab instead of refusing it; from then on the session works in it like one of its own, and says so:

{ "tabIndex": 3, "safeUrl": "https://mail.example.com/inbox", "note": "(user tab, opted-in)" }

What the flag deliberately does not do:

• It unlocks adoption, not the guards. Only safari_switch_tab adopts, and only the tab you named. An ordinary click or navigate still never lands on whatever tab happens to be in front — the server acts on the tab you pointed it at, not the one you wandered to.
• safari_close_tab still refuses. Closing is the one action whose cost you cannot undo, so an adopted tab is writable, never disposable. Close it yourself.
• Adoption is session-local. Nothing is written to the shared ownership file, so it ends with the session rather than leaking to the next process on the machine.

safari_doctor prints the flag's state, and every operation on an adopted tab logs (user tab, opted-in) — so "why did it touch my tab" has an answer instead of being a mystery. Default off; set it only for agents you want working inside your own browsing session. Designed in #92.

Environment variables

SAFARI_MCP_RAISE_ON_NAVIGATE=1 is for agents whose whole point is showing you a page — a voice assistant answering "open YouTube", a demo driver. Everything else should leave it off: by default Safari MCP works in the background and hands focus back to whatever app you were using, so an agent can drive a page while you keep typing somewhere else.

Tools (97)

Security

Safari MCP runs locally on your Mac with minimal attack surface:

Safari MCP vs Alternatives