Operating
Client & Provider Compatibility
Which clients and provider categories are known to work end-to-end through the gateway.
Which clients and provider categories are known to work end-to-end through the gateway. The gateway is protocol-agnostic at the byte level, so anything speaking CDP or the Playwright wire protocol over WebSocket should work, this page lists what is exercised in the release suite.
Clients
| Client | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Puppeteer (puppeteer-core) | Full | puppeteer.connect({ browserWSEndpoint }) works against every provider category below. |
Playwright (playwright-core) | Full | Use chromium.connect(wsEndpoint) for Playwright-server providers, chromium.connectOverCDP(wsEndpoint) for CDP endpoints. Version pinning still applies for Playwright-server. |
| Stagehand | Full | Uses Playwright under the hood, so anything true of Playwright is true here. |
| browser-use | Full | Uses Playwright. |
| chromedp (Go) | Full | Uses raw CDP. Point at ws://gateway:9500/v1/connect like any other CDP endpoint. |
| MCP clients (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf) | Full via the built-in MCP server | Also works via Playwright MCP pointed at the gateway. |
Providers
| Provider category | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted runtime (browserserve) | Full | The only category safe for multi-profile write-back on a single slot. Auto-detected, capacity is host-derived. |
Self-hosted Chrome (--remote-debugging-port) | Full | Point at http://host:9222, the gateway auto-discovers the CDP path. |
| Self-hosted Playwright server | Full | Client and server Playwright versions must match exactly. |
| Any WebSocket CDP endpoint | Full, including saving profiles | On a provider that reuses browsers, leftovers from earlier sessions can be saved with a profile. See Profiles → Providers And Profiles. |
Any provider that speaks CDP over WebSocket should work. The gateway probes each provider on registration and surfaces detected capabilities in the dashboard under Providers.
Feature Support By Provider Category
| Feature | Self-hosted runtime | External CDP |
|---|---|---|
| Byte-level relay + routing | Yes | Yes |
| Failover / cooldown / weighted routing | Yes | Yes |
Profile inject (cookies + localStorage) | Yes, any profile | Yes, only the pinned profile |
Profile inject (IndexedDB + service workers) | Yes | No, CDP has no wire format for these |
| Profile capture-on-navigate (multi-origin) | Yes | Yes |
multiProfile: true (many profiles per slot) | Yes | Rejected when added or edited, turned off at startup |
Session replay (?session_record=true) | Yes | Yes when the provider supports Page.startScreencast |
Live playground (WS /v1/live) | Yes | Yes |
Read-only profile sessions (?readOnly=1) | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic residue detection | N/A (fresh session by construction) | Yes, HTTP 409 on cross-profile residue |
Known Limitations
- Session reconnection works with Puppeteer and raw CDP clients. Playwright destroys contexts on disconnect, so it does not survive a reconnect. See Session Reconnection.
- REST endpoints (
/v1/screenshot,/v1/content,/v1/scrape) get their browsers by connecting to the gateway's own/v1/connect, so they are routed, queued and failed over like any other connection. A request that names aprovideris pinned to it and does not fail over. The pool keeps those browsers open between requests (see Session Pool). - Non-Chromium engines (Firefox, WebKit) are not supported. CDP is Chromium-specific.