We made Playwright 2x faster and 80% more token efficient

We built Stagehand 2 years ago (24k stars and 4M monthly npm downloads) and recently fixed its biggest flaw: round-trip latency.

Every action performed requires a round trip between your script and the browser (short when running locally but increased when running in the cloud). We also saw multiple posts complaining about the eager token appetite of Playwright MCP.

For this reason, we rebuilt Stagehand from the ground up and shipped v4, where Stagehand controls the browser from an extension automatically loaded upon your browser startup.

Stagehand v4 comes with batch command support, dedicated token-efficient methods `act()` and `extract()`, and a brand new architecture making it 2x faster than Playwright and 80% more token efficient.

You can see for yourself by looking at our benchmarks, comparing its performance across a dozen models (frontier and open weights) and tools (Codex, Claude Code, and more): https://www.stagehand.dev/evals

Ask me anything!

If your needs are simpler, I created a tiny headless WebKit browser specifically for agents called Sleepy Hollow [0]

[0]: https://github.com/bensyverson/sleepyhollow

So for an enterprise with a 1,000 test Playwright suite, does this basically mean ~2x faster CI times? That would be huge.

seems really cool! although, one question i have is why not keep agent() alongside the new primatives? it seems v4 removed agent() entirely rather than offering it with all of act(), observe(), extract().

Do I need to pay for Browserbase to use this?

what did you lose compared to CDP (e.g. cross-origin iframes, downloads running in envs where you can't load extensions)?

How much does the harness really matter for evals?

lowk why not just do astra computer use