Manus, the viral AI “agent” platform from Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, has had an unintended side effect: raising the profile of another AI tool called Browser Use.
Browser Use, which aims to make websites more accessible for agentic applications that perform tasks on a user’s behalf, has experienced explosive growth in the past week. Daily downloads more than quintupled from around 5,000 on March 3 to 28,000 on March 10, co-creator Gregor Zunic told TechCrunch.
“The past few days have been really wild,” Zunic said via DM. “We are the biggest trending repository [on GitHub], got loads of downloads [and] all that actually converts to big usage numbers.”
Why the uptick? A post about how Manus leverages Browser Use garnered over 2.4 millions views and hundreds of reshares on X. Browser Use is one of the components Manus employs to execute various tasks, like clicking through site menus and filling out forms.
Zunic launched the eponymous company behind Browser Use with Magnus Müller last year out of ETH Zurich’s Student Project House accelerator. The pair thought web agents — agents that navigate websites and web apps autonomously — were going to be the “big thing” in 2025.
“What started as casual brainstorming over a few lunches turned into a challenge: let’s build something small, throw it on Hacker News, and see what happens,” Zunic said. “We put together an MVP in four days, launched it, and boom — number one. From there, it’s been an absolute rocket.”
Brower Use extracts a website’s elements — buttons, widgets, and so on — to allow AI models to more easily interact with them. The tool can manage multiple browser tabs, set up actions like saving files and performing database operations, and handle mouse and keyboard inputs.
Browser Use the company charges for managed plans, but also offers a free, self-hosted version of its software. That’s the version that’s blown up in the days since Manus’ unveiling.
Zunic says he and Magnus are trying to “sell a shovel” to developers chasing after the gold rush of web agents.
“We wanted to create a foundation layer that everyone will build browser agents on,” Zunic said. “In our minds, there will be more agents on the web than humans by the end of the year.”
That might sound overly bullish, but several analysts predict that the broader market for AI agents will indeed grow enormously in the months to come. According to Research and Markets, the sector will reach $42 billion in 2029. Deloitte anticipates that half of companies using AI will deploy AI agents by 2027.
Manus effect aside, Browser Use’s timing appears to have been fortuitous.
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