Live View
An interactive window to display or control a browser session.
On any running browser session - watch, click, type, and scroll in real-time.
Uses
While Browserbase helps with anti-bot mechanisms, scraping, and reliable file downloads among other features, some scenarios remain challenging to fully automate for technical or data-privacy reasons.
Live Views can be useful for:
- Debugging and observability - watch everything happening live, or share with users or coworkers
- Human in the loop - instantly take control or provide input
- handle iframes - loaded content might be external or could change without notice, potentially leading to error conditions without human intervention
- delegate credentials - give control to the end user
- Embedding - use within an application
Getting Started
Need help getting started? Check out our Create a Browser Session and Using Browser Sessions guides.
Also checkout our Live Views API endpoint.
Disconnect Message
When the browser session ends, the live view will show this message:
Multitab
Each tab has a unique live view link. The pages list provides live view links for every open tab.
Embed
In the frontend of your application, add the live view link to an iframe to embed it.
Styling
Browser with Borders
Mimic a real browser with borders.
Hide the Navbar
The live view includes a navbar at the top, for additional context and navigation control.
To maximize the visible area, or for integrating with a UI that already provides context, you can hide the navbar.
Hide the Scrollbar
Common Errors & Issues
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Blank or Empty Window
We may be on another tab. Check if there are multiple tabs open either via the web session inspector or the pages list.
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Lag
Check out our performance guide.
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Looks Off
Often bugs from a rendering headless browser - some bugs may be amenable to directly adjusting css styling, for example through
page.evaluate()
. -
Lost Connection
If the live view loses its connection to the browser, the iframe will post a message to the window warning you of the new state.
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