Cloud Parts

Cloudflare Browser RunRenamed

Headless Chrome on demand in Cloudflare’s network, called Browser Rendering until April 2026: one HTTP call for a screenshot, PDF, Markdown or crawl, or a full browser session driven by Puppeteer, Playwright, CDP or an AI agent.

What it is
Serverless functions (FaaS)
Used for
Automated testing
Type
Commercial product
Made by
Cloudflare, Inc.
License
Proprietary (the Puppeteer and Playwright forks are open source)
Status
Renamed. Called Browser Rendering (Workers Browser Rendering API) until 15 April 2026; some API paths still use the old name.
Facts checked
12 October 2026
Website

What it is

Cloudflare keeps a pool of Chrome browsers in its network and hands them out per request. There are two ways in. Quick Actions are stateless REST endpoints (/screenshot, /pdf, /markdown, /content, /scrape, /links, /json for AI extraction, /crawl for whole sites) that load a URL or raw HTML and return the result, with nothing to deploy. Browser Sessions give you the browser itself: a Worker launches one through a browser binding with Cloudflare’s forks of Puppeteer or Playwright, or any client connects to its Chrome DevTools Protocol endpoint over a WebSocket, including MCP clients such as Claude Desktop and Cursor. A browser closes after 60 seconds idle unless keep_alive extends that to 10 minutes, and sessions can be reused across requests.

Billing counts browser hours: the Workers Paid plan includes 10 hours a month, then $0.09 an hour; Browser Sessions also count concurrent browsers, 10 included (averaged over the month), then $2.00 each. The Free plan gets 10 minutes a day and 3 concurrent browsers. Paid accounts can run 200 browsers at once, start 3 new ones a second and send 30 Quick Actions a second by default. In April 2026 the product was renamed Browser Run, because “Browser Rendering never fully captured what the product does,” and gained Live View, human-in-the-loop handoff, session recordings and WebMCP for AI agents.

Why teams pick it

  • No Chrome fleet to run: screenshots, PDFs and Markdown take one REST call, and browsers scale to hundreds in parallel
  • Existing Puppeteer, Playwright and CDP scripts port with minimal changes, which suits end-to-end tests and automation in CI
  • Built for agents: MCP and CDP access, Live View, session recordings and human-in-the-loop handoff when a login page blocks the agent
  • Cheap at low volume: 10 browser hours a month included on Workers Paid, then $0.09 an hour

Watch out for

  • Browsers close after 60 seconds idle by default and 10 minutes at most with keep_alive, unless the session keeps sending commands
  • Requests are always identified as bots, so sites with bot protection may block it; allowlisting your own site needs an Enterprise plan
  • Chrome only, through Cloudflare’s forks of Puppeteer (v1.1.0, based on Puppeteer 22.13.1) and Playwright, which trail the upstream releases
  • The Free plan is tiny: 10 browser minutes a day, 3 concurrent browsers and one new browser every 20 seconds

Alternatives

What all serverless functions (faas) have in common →
AWS LambdaAWSAWS’s functions service: upload a handler, connect a trigger, and pay per request and per millisecond.Beta9Open sourceThe open-source engine behind Beam’s cloud: decorate a Python function and it runs as an autoscaling GPU endpoint, task queue or sandbox, on Beam or on your own Kubernetes cluster.Cloudflare WorkersCommercialFunctions that run in V8 isolates on Cloudflare’s network, close to the user, with almost no cold start.+1 WranglerFissionOpen sourceOpen-source functions on Kubernetes: a pool of warm, generic pods takes your code on the first call, so cold starts stay around 100 ms.workerdOpen sourceThe open-source JavaScript and WebAssembly server runtime behind Cloudflare Workers, which you can run yourself as an application server, a local dev server or a programmable HTTP proxy.Workers AICommercialServerless inference on GPUs in Cloudflare’s network: call one of 50+ open models by name from a Worker binding or a REST API, and pay per unit of GPU work instead of renting GPUs.

How it fits with other technologies

Screenshot any page from a Worker through a browser binding · ts

import puppeteer from "@cloudflare/puppeteer";

interface Env {
  MYBROWSER: Fetcher;
}

export default {
  async fetch(request, env): Promise<Response> {
    const target = new URL(request.url).searchParams.get("url") ?? "https://example.com";
    const browser = await puppeteer.launch(env.MYBROWSER);
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    await page.goto(target);
    const png = await page.screenshot();
    await browser.close();
    return new Response(png, { headers: { "content-type": "image/png" } });
  },
} satisfies ExportedHandler<Env>;

See it in a real stack

No architecture uses Cloudflare Browser Run yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →
Where it came from2023–2026

Taking screenshots, generating PDFs, crawling pages and testing web applications all need a real browser, and running Chrome fleets is tedious. Cloudflare’s answer was the Workers Browser Rendering API, which gave a Worker a binding to a Chromium instance in its network. Celso Martinho announced the open beta on May 19, 2023. Under the hood it exposed a WebSocket endpoint speaking the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and Cloudflare published a lightly patched fork of Puppeteer, @cloudflare/puppeteer, so developers could use a familiar API instead of writing a DevTools client.

It left beta for all paid Workers plans in April 2024, with session management for reusing browsers. In 2025 a REST API for one-call tasks (screenshots, PDFs, Markdown, JSON extraction) became generally available with a free tier, Playwright support arrived and went GA, and billing began on August 20, 2025 at $0.09 per browser hour.

On April 15, 2026, during Agents Week, Kathy Liao announced the rename to Browser Run and repositioned it as the browser for AI agents: a direct CDP endpoint, MCP client support, WebMCP, Live View, human-in-the-loop handoff and session recordings, with concurrency limits raised from 30 to 120 browsers. By August 2026 the default rose to 200.

Why it’s built this way

Fork Puppeteer instead of inventing an API
Puppeteer was already one of the most popular ways to drive Chrome over DevTools. Patching it to connect to Cloudflare’s browsers kept changes minimal, so developers can use the full Puppeteer API as on a standard setup.
Expose the DevTools Protocol
CDP is how tools and agents control browsers; exposing it directly means existing CDP scripts and MCP clients work against Cloudflare’s browsers from any environment.
A new name for an agent-era product
Cloudflare said “Browser Rendering” never captured what the product does: running full sessions, driven by code or AI, with recording, crawling, live debugging and human handoff.

Timeline

  1. 2023

    Workers Browser Rendering API enters open beta on May 19, with @cloudflare/puppeteer

  2. 2024

    Out of beta for all paid Workers plans in April, with session reuse

  3. 2025

    REST API generally available with a free tier on April 7; billing at $0.09 per browser hour from August 20

  4. 2025

    Playwright support generally available in September

  5. 2026

    Renamed Browser Run on April 15, with CDP, MCP, Live View and session recordings

  6. 2026

    Default limits raised to 200 concurrent browsers in August

Sources10 · facts checked 12 October 2026

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