Puppeteer (archived)
Puppeteer MCP is an archived reference server from Anthropic's original example set. It drives a headless Chrome session over stdio and hands an agent seven tools: navigate, click, fill, select, hover, evaluate arbitrary JavaScript, and screenshot. The npm package now ships a deprecation warning, so what you get is a frozen demonstration of browser control rather than a maintained product.
How we started it
npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-puppeteerIt works. We started it with a clean env and it came up in 33.5 seconds on first run, exposed 7 tools and one resource, and asked for nothing. The catch is the two deprecation warnings it prints on the way up, one for the server package and one for the bundled Puppeteer version, and nobody is shipping fixes behind them. Use it for a throwaway scraping errand on your own machine; for anything you plan to keep running, skip it and take the maintained Playwright server instead.
Use it if
Skip it if
The bill for your context window
| Tool | Est. tokens | Described? | Required params |
|---|---|---|---|
| puppeteer_screenshot | ~159 | yes (59 chars) | 1 |
| puppeteer_navigate | ~139 | yes (17 chars) | 1 |
| puppeteer_select | ~77 | yes (45 chars) | 2 |
| puppeteer_fill | ~69 | yes (23 chars) | 2 |
| puppeteer_evaluate | ~57 | yes (41 chars) | 1 |
| puppeteer_click | ~55 | yes (28 chars) | 1 |
| puppeteer_hover | ~55 | yes (28 chars) | 1 |
612 tokens for the whole tools/list, estimated at 4 chars per token from a 2,448 byte payload, measured 2026-08-19. That is below the median of the servers we measured in this batch, and a rounding error next to the Notion server, whose tool list costs more than an order of magnitude more. The weight is spread evenly and honestly: puppeteer_screenshot is the heaviest at 159 tokens because it carries width, height and selector options, puppeteer_navigate follows at 139, and the rest sit between 55 and 77. No tool is paying for a description it does not need. Some are paying too little; puppeteer_navigate documents itself in 17 characters, which is thin guidance for a model deciding when to call it.
Setup reality
Nothing to configure. The harness ran npx with the package name, no env vars, no tokens, no config file, and the server initialized on protocol 2024-11-05 identifying itself as example-servers/puppeteer 0.1.0. envHints came back empty because nothing was ever asked for. The 33.5 seconds is npx fetching the package and Chrome coming up; a warm cache makes it much shorter. The real setup cost is the operating system underneath, since a headless Chrome needs its shared libraries present or the process dies before MCP ever speaks.
Questions people ask
Is the Puppeteer MCP server still maintained?
No. It was moved to the archived section of Anthropic's reference servers, and installing it prints a deprecation notice for the package plus a second one for the Puppeteer version it pins. It still boots and still works; it just has nobody behind it.
What should I use instead of Puppeteer MCP?
The Playwright MCP server is the maintained answer for browser automation, with a larger tool surface and active releases. You pay for that in context: this one lists 7 tools in 612 tokens, and most of the alternatives ask considerably more of your window.
Is the slow first start expected?
We measured a cold run: npx downloading the package, then Chrome launching, together 33.5 seconds before initialize returned. Once npm has the package cached, startup is dominated by Chrome alone. If your client has a boot timeout, raise it before the first run.
Does it need any API keys or environment variables?
None. It booted under a clean env with no secrets and reported no missing variables, which is unusual in this batch. Everything it does happens through a local Chrome process you already trust or already do not.
Other browsers servers we started
| Server | Vendor | Boots | Context tax |
|---|---|---|---|
| Browserbase | Browserbase | ✓ | ~393 tokens |
| Playwright MCP | Microsoft | ✓ | ~4,626 tokens |
How this page is made: the server is spawned as an unprivileged user with a clean environment and no credentials, then asked for its tools, resources and prompts over stdio. Token figures are estimates at four characters per token, not a tokenizer count. One run, one machine. Corrections: contact the desk.