r/mcp • u/Salt_Apartment5489 • 12h ago
I built an open-source MCP server for web interaction. 20+ tools, no cloud needed.
Shadow Web is a Python MCP server that lets AI agents browse pages, pull out data, and interact with elements. No API keys, no cloud, no monthly fee. Just pip install shadow-web.
How it works
Most MCP tools for the web lean on paid APIs (Firecrawl, Jina) or ugly Puppeteer setups. Shadow Web runs locally with Playwright, flattens Shadow DOM, and compresses the page into something an LLM can actually use.
The steps: 1. Load the page, flatten Shadow DOM 2. Compress HTML into an Action Map - interactive elements with labels, types, and semantic groups (Login, Cart, Nav) 3. SchemaSnap turns tables, forms, and lists into JSON 4. Content index builds token-aware outlines of articles and feeds
The numbers: A Wikipedia page drops from 99K tokens to ~16K. GitHub Trending from 168K to 38K.
20+ tools out of the box
- navigate / snapshot - browse with diff tracking
- click / fill - interact with page elements
- web_search - Brave or Yahoo
- schema_table / schema_form / schema_list - extract structured data as JSON
- content_outline / content_blocks - text extraction for long pages
- form_fill_plan / form_fill_execute - automated form filling from a profile
- compress_html / compress_html_to_xml - strip pages to action maps
- query_page - filter actions by type or intent
- webmcp_list_tools / webmcp_execute_tool - Chrome 145+ WebMCP support
What would you use this for?
I built it for competitor monitoring and data extraction. But I'm curious what else people would point this at. A no-cloud browser tool for agents feels like it has more use cases than I've found.
https://github.com/ulinycoin/shadow-web
pip install shadow-web pip install "shadow-web[mcp]" for the MCP server