Chromium is Too Heavy, Cloudflare Rebuilds Browser for Agents

According to the latest findings from Beating Monitoring, Cloudflare has revamped the AI Agent with a new browser engine called Kitesurf. It no longer relies on Chromium, instead running directly on Cloudflare Workers. The new engine is currently open for testing and will be open-sourced in the future.

Cloudflare believes that web browsing on the Agent does not require features like tab management, theming, or extensions, nor does it aim for pixel-perfect webpage rendering. Continuing to launch the full Chromium browser was deemed to be a waste of computational power and memory.

During testing, Kitesurf showed a CPU usage reduction to about one-third of Chromium's usage, with memory consumption dropping to as low as approximately one-seventh. However, it is not faster; in fact, tasks take around 70% to 80% longer to complete. The main advantage lies in resource efficiency, allowing more Agents to run simultaneously.

Kitesurf has been integrated into Cloudflare Browser Run and can be invoked by Puppeteer, Playwright, MCP, and CDP. The current testing phase is free of charge. Nevertheless, Kitesurf does not yet support video, WebGL, some anti-bot mechanisms, and persistent login sessions. For complex webpages requiring these features, Chromium is still necessary.