Claude and chrome-devtools-mcp

Posted on Thursday, July 23, 2026


 


The chrome-devtools-mcp https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp/ [1]

Is an official MCP (Model Context Protocol) server from the chrome team that gives AI coding agents direct access to a live chrome browser and its DevTools Capabilities.

 

Why is this important?  It gives your AI a way to access the internet via its own Chrome browser so its not coding blind.   It can make a change and see that change in its own browser.


Some pre-setup 

I got this working on my Ubuntu 24.04 WSL system using Grok (see https://www.whiteboardcoder.com/2026/07/grok-and-chrome-devtools-mcp.html [2])

I had to install Chrome on Ubuntu using the following command (for WSL)

Here is a simple procedure to fix this. (For Ubuntu 24.04 in WSL)

 

 

> wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
> sudo apt install ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
> rm google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

 


Now test it.

 

> google-chrome --version

 

 

Chances are you do not have my setup but just wanted to show what I had to do.

 

Getting it set up

Start Claude

 

> claude

 

Add the marketplace

 

> /plugin marketplace add ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp

 

 




Success

Install the plugin 

 

> /plugin install chrome-devtools-mcp@chrome-devtools-plugins

 

 



Select User Scope

 

Installed

Restart Claude

And lets try it out.

 

> Open https://example.com and take a screen shot

 

 



That opened chrome and it also took a screen shot and saved it as a .png file.


OK can I do this headless ( and not open the chrome browser)

 

> Open https://example.com and take a screen shot, but do it in headless mode

 

That worked… but it took a while.

And it was a little Kludgy

So let’s add some stuff to ~/.claude.json

 

> vi ~/.claude.json

 

 


And update your mcpServers section

 

  "mcpServers": {
    "my-prompt-server": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "http://localhost:8000/mcp"
    }
    "chrome-devtools": {
        "command": "npx",
        "args": ["chrome-devtools-mcp@1.6.0", "--headless=true"]
      }
  },

 

 

I added the chrome-devtools sections and added the –headless=true arg.Z
Let me restart Claude and test it.

 

> Open https://example.com and take a screen shot

 

OK that did not work… It still opened chrome

Looks like I need to disable the plugin version

 

> vi ~/.claude/settings.json

 

 


Make this false


Restart Claude and try again.

 

> Open https://example.com and take a screen shot

 


OK that worked in a headless manner!

 


 

References

 

[1]       chrome-devtools-mcp github repo
             
https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp/
            Accessed 07/2026
[2]       Grok and chrome-devtools-mcp
             
https://www.whiteboardcoder.com/2026/07/grok-and-chrome-devtools-mcp.html
                
Accessed 07/2026

 

 

 

 


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