Why a browser and not a fetch
Most of the web an agent needs is no longer in the HTML you get from a GET request. Listings, dashboards, booking flows and half the modern press render client-side. An agent limited to raw HTTP concludes the page is empty — and, worse, often summarises that emptiness confidently.
So Forge browses with an actual browser. The agent asks for a URL and receives what a person sitting in front of the page would see.
What agents can do with it
- Read a rendered page — the common case, and the one that makes research trustworthy. This is what lets a verifying agent open a source and confirm a quote rather than trusting a link’s title.
- Work across several steps — open a session, navigate, act, collect. Useful when the thing you want is three clicks deep rather than at a URL.
- Bring back artifacts — screenshots and files produced during a session are stored and handed back as links, so a large capture never has to be pasted into a transcript.
Where it earns its place
Browsing is not a feature people ask for by name. It shows up as the reason other things work:
- The research use case verifies sources by opening them. Without a real browser, “verified” would mean “the URL responded.”
- A digest workflow reads sources that render client-side, which is most of them.
- A planning workflow can read live prices and schedules rather than a model’s recollection of them.
Boundaries worth knowing
- Egress is watched and scoped. Browsing is an outbound capability, and it is allowlisted by destination per character rather than open by default.
- Credentials stay outside the agent. The browsing service is credential-fronted — see Secrets & Egress for the general rule this follows.
- It is a tool, not a crawler. Forge browses pages an agent has a reason to open. It is not a site-wide scraping engine and does not try to be.
Under the hood
- Secrets & Egress — why the agent never holds the key
- Isolated Stacks — what bounds a run that can reach the internet
- Media Generation — the same storage path artifacts come back through