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How is Vibium different from Selenium / Playwright / Puppeteer?

Vibium targets AI agents first and humans second. Its surface area is small and verb-shaped (go, map, click, fill), its element references are short and human-readable (@e1), and it favors semantic locators (text, label, placeholder, role) over CSS selectors. The result is a tool an LLM can use correctly with very little prompting.

Under the hood it speaks W3C WebDriver BiDi, the same standards-track protocol the wider browser-automation ecosystem is moving toward.

Which browsers does it support?

Chrome and Firefox. Vibium ships with its own managed Google Chrome for Testing build, downloaded automatically on first use; Firefox is one vibium install --engine firefox (or just --engine firefox on any command) away. Both use the browser's native WebDriver BiDi — no driver binaries. See Using Firefox.

Can Vibium drive the browser with AI?

Yes — in the nightly builds and the next npm release. vibium run "<goal>" hands a goal to a configured model, which drives the browser tools itself; vibium check "<claim>" independently verifies an outcome. Providers: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, or any OpenAI-compatible (including local) server. See Run and Check.

Do I need to install a separate driver?

No. Vibium is one ~10 MB binary. There is no chromedriver, no geckodriver, no profile directory you have to maintain.

Do I need to install Vibium at all?

No. Every command works through npx:

npx -y vibium go https://example.com
npx -y vibium screenshot -o page.png
npx -y vibium text

This is convenient for CI jobs, throwaway scripts, sandboxes, or any host where you'd rather not install software globally. See Installation for details.

Can I run Vibium headlessly on CI?

Yes. The browser will run without a visible window on hosts without a display, and --headless forces it anywhere. Capture commands (screenshot, text, pdf) work the same way as on a desktop. Pin the browser with VIBIUM_ENGINE_VERSION to keep a CI fleet on one version.

Can two scripts drive browsers at the same time?

Yes — give each its own named session with --session <name> or VIBIUM_SESSION. Each session gets its own daemon and browser. See Concurrent sessions.

Is there a Python / TypeScript / Java SDK?

Yes — see Client Libraries. All three wrap the same binary, so behavior is identical across languages.

How do I plug it into Codex or another agent?

Register Vibium as an MCP server. See MCP Server Integration.

Why semantic locators instead of CSS selectors?

CSS selectors are brittle: a refactor of class names breaks all your tests. They are also hard for an LLM to produce reliably. Semantic locators (find text "Sign in", find label "Email", find role button) describe what a human would describe, which is also what an LLM tends to produce naturally.

vibium eval is still available when you genuinely need a CSS or XPath selector for something the semantic API can't express.

What's the license?

Apache 2.0.

Where does Vibium store data?

The bundled browser and any cached state live in Vibium's data directory. Removing that directory wipes Vibium's local state without affecting your system Chrome.