🚀 First integrated browser for VS Code editor with Claude Code and Codex support 🎆

VS Code's own browser tab, wired to your AI assistant: click an element and it becomes a prompt, or hand the whole browser over and let the agent drive it.

⚠️ Important: enable the browser API

VS Code only hands a proposed API to an extension that was named on the command line, so after installing the full extension (see below) the browser features stay unavailable until you turn the API on. It takes one click:

1. Click the orange Enable Browser API button in the status bar — or open the Command Palette (Cmd+Shift+P / Ctrl+Shift+P) and run AI Browser: Enable Integrated Browser API.
2. Choose Quit when it offers to.

The extension adds itself to enable-proposed-api in your argv.json, keeping the file's comments and anything already listed there. The button then disappears — while a restart is still pending it reads Restart to finish. Any element command run before then says so in the status bar and points at the same button.

A permanent AI Browser button stays in the status bar: clicking it opens a menu with Open URL, Open File, Connect Claude Code, Connect Codex, Check Connection and Settings.

A full quit is required — Reload Window is not enough, because argv.json is only read when the process starts.

Prefer to do it by hand? Run Preferences: Configure Runtime Arguments from the Command Palette and add this property inside the existing { ... }, appending to the array if it is already there:

"enable-proposed-api": ["DenysDavydov.tab-browser-ultimate"]

Without this, browser features fail with CANNOT use API proposal: browser.

This step is not enough on every editor. Enabling proposed APIs only grants what the editor has, and some forks ship no browser API at all — on those, nothing here can help, and the webview panel is what works instead (set aiBrowser.useIntegratedBrowser to false and run AI Browser: Show). The table below says which is which.

📦 Install, and which editors it works on

This Marketplace entry is the guide. The working extension ships as a VSIX and on Open VSX, because it is built on VS Code API proposals and the Marketplace does not accept those.

Measured by reading the shipped builds on 2026-09-09, ordered by how much work each one takes:

On VS Code: ⬇️ download tab-browser-ultimate.vsix → press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P → Extensions: Install from VSIX… → pick the file. There is no one-click route here, and it is not an oversight: VS Code's gallery is this Marketplace, and it rejects any extension declaring API proposals — which is exactly what the browser features are built on.

Everywhere else: install from Open VSX in one click — directly on VSCodium, through a mirror on Devin. Note that installing and working are different questions: Open VSX will happily install this on Cursor, where the browser features can never run. The .vsix works on any of them too, if you prefer it.

Once the full build is in, this entry stops advertising itself — but keep it, because it has a second job: it tells you when a new version is released. A VSIX installed by hand never updates itself, and neither VS Code nor Open VSX will say a word about it. This one checks for you, at most every few hours, and stays silent unless there is something newer than what you have.

The browser features need VS Code 1.112 or later — that is where the editor's own browser tab and its browser API proposal exist, and a fork's own version number does not tell you (Cursor reports a 1.128 base and still lacks it). On an editor without it the extension still loads and falls back to its webview panel.

What it does

Front-end work is a loop: look at the page, find the element, describe it to the assistant, check what changed. Screenshots lose the markup, hand-copied class names go stale, and a headless browser opens a session you are not logged into. This extension closes the loop inside the editor: the page you are looking at is the page your agent reads and drives.

• 🌐 VS Code's built-in browser, not a webview approximation. Pages open in the editor's own browser editor — a real Chromium tab with history, find in page, page zoom, DevTools and working keyboard shortcuts. The extension attaches to it over the Chrome DevTools Protocol, the same channel the editor uses for its own browser features.
• 🎯 Click an element, get the whole story. One pick returns a report: what the element is, where it sits in the html, its outer markup, its box, and the css that actually applies to it — matched rules in cascade order, inherited rules, resolved values and css variables. Hover highlighting comes from the DevTools overlay, so picking feels like the inspector.
• 📍 Or just its address. A CSS selector or an XPath, built to survive the next rebuild: the XPath anchors on a unique id when there is one and adds a positional predicate only where a tag really repeats; the selector deliberately leaves utility class names out.
• ✨ One click turns it into a prompt. Send the element, its selector or its path straight into Claude Code or Codex as a file their agent reads — so "make this button match the one above" is a sentence, not a paragraph of description.
• 📸 Screenshots that paste as pictures. The visible area or the whole scrollable page, on the system clipboard as a real PNG — Cmd/Ctrl + V into a chat, an issue or a document.
• ⌨️ One key repeats what you did last. The toolbar's right-hand button and Cmd/Ctrl + Alt + C both run the action you used last, whichever of the nine it was.
• 🔌 An MCP server, with nothing to install. No package, no separate process to babysit: the extension starts a local server on activation, and one command configures Claude Code, Codex or VS Code's own chat to use it.
• 🤖 Then the agent drives the page itself. Twelve tools: snapshot what is clickable, read the html or the text, inspect an element, click, fill fields, wait for a render, screenshot, navigate — then read the console to see what its own change actually did.
• 👀 In your session, not a fresh one. Same cookies, same dev server, same logged-in state, already past the auth wall you passed this morning. You watch every step happen in the tab and can take the mouse back at any point.
• 🔒 Local by construction. Loopback only, a bearer token per workspace, and any request carrying an Origin header refused before its credentials are looked at.

Getting started, once the VSIX is in

1. Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P → AI Browser: Show → type a url.
2. The globe button on the browser tab opens everything the extension does.
3. To let an assistant drive the page: same dropdown → Connect Claude Code or Connect Codex, then restart Claude Code / start a new Codex conversation, because neither re-reads its config while running.

What this build does

It is the listing, and it is the update watch — the second half is the reason to keep it installed:

Install AI Browser sits in the status bar while there is something to do about it. It opens a dialog with the three version numbers — this listing, the latest full build on Open VSX, and the one installed here — and the download. Once the full build is installed and current the button is gone; while it is behind, it reads Update AI Browser.

The update watch runs on its own once the full build is installed: it asks Open VSX (and falls back to the repository) at most once every six hours, compares the answer with the version you have, and only then says anything. Each release is offered once, not once per window, and the offer opens the .vsix for that exact version. Everything that is not an available update — "you are up to date", "could not reach the registry" — goes to the status bar rather than a notification.

It says hello once per released version of this listing, ten seconds after startup — a notification would otherwise pause a browser tab restored with the window. Before the full build is installed the listing commands are in the Command Palette; afterwards they hide themselves and only Check for Updates remains.

Links

• 📖 Full documentation
• 🐞 Issues
• 🧩 Open VSX listing — the full build

Another extension worth having

Task & Script Explorer — Marketplace · Open VSX

License

MIT. Parts of the full build are forked from microsoft/vscode and carry Microsoft's copyright alongside this project's.