PinchTab

Welcome to PinchTab — browser control for AI agents, scripts, and automation workflows.

What is PinchTab?

PinchTab is a standalone HTTP server that gives you direct control over a Chrome browser. Any AI agent can use the CLI or HTTP API.

CLI example:

bash terminal 
# Navigatepinchtab nav https://example.com# Get interactive elementspinchtab snap -i -c# Click element by refpinchtab click e5

HTTP example (realistic flow):

bash terminal 
# 1. Navigate to URL (returns tabId)TAB=$(curl -s -X POST http://localhost:9867/tab \  -d '{"action":"new","url":"https://example.com"}' | jq -r '.tabId')# 2. Get page structurecurl -s "http://localhost:9867/snapshot?tabId=$TAB&filter=interactive" | jq# 3. Click element using the tabIdcurl -s -X POST http://localhost:9867/action \  -d "{\"kind\":\"click\",\"ref\":\"e5\",\"tabId\":\"$TAB\"}"

Characteristics

  • Tab-Centric — Everything revolves around tabs, not URLs
  • Stateful — Sessions persist between requests. Log in once, stay logged in across restarts
  • Token Inexpensive — Text extraction at 800 tokens/page (5-13x cheaper than full snapshots)
  • Flexible Modes — Run headless, headed, with browser profiles, or connect to external Chrome via CDP
  • Monitoring & Control — Tab locking for multi-agent safety, stealth mode for bot detection bypass

Features

  • 🌲 Accessibility Tree — Structured DOM with stable refs (e0, e1…) for click, type, read. No coordinate guessing.
  • 🎯 Smart Filters — ?filter=interactive returns only buttons, links, inputs. Fewer tokens per snapshot.
  • 🕵️ Stealth Mode — Patches navigator.webdriver, spoofs UA, hides automation flags for bot detection bypass.
  • 📝 Text Extraction — Readability mode (clean) or raw (full HTML). Choose based on workflow.
  • 🖱️ Direct Actions — Click, type, fill, press, focus, hover, select, scroll by ref or selector.
  • ⚡ JavaScript Execution — Run arbitrary JS in any tab. Escape hatch for workflow gaps.
  • 📸 Screenshots — JPEG output with quality control.
  • 📄 PDF Export — Full pages to PDF with headers, footers, landscape mode.
  • 🎭 Multi-Tab — Create, switch, close tabs. Work with multiple pages concurrently.

Support & Community

License

MIT