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Browser mode removed (victauri-browser / @4da/victauri-browser) — migration notes #15

Description

@runyourempire

As of 2026-06-09, browser mode has been removed from Victauri — the victauri-browser crate, the Chrome/Firefox extensions, and the @4da/victauri-browser npm package. The crates.io versions are yanked and the npm package is unpublished.

Why

Browser mode was an experimental exploration to bring MCP inspection to any website. We removed it to focus on Victauri's actual strength:

  • It was off-thesis. Victauri's value is being inside the Tauri process — read-only access to the webview + IPC + Rust backend + database + native window state, on macOS/Windows/Linux, where CDP/WebDriver can't even attach (WKWebView/WebKitGTK). Browser mode competed on Playwright/CDP's turf, where they're more mature.
  • It was the highest-risk surface. The browser path was the only place Victauri touched an untrusted web page.
  • It was unused and frozen for several releases.

If you were using it

For browser automation (inspecting arbitrary websites), use a dedicated tool — Playwright or the Chrome DevTools Protocol are excellent and purpose-built for this.

For Tauri apps — nothing changes. The embedded plugin (victauri-plugin) and the rest of the toolchain are unaffected and actively developed. That's the core of Victauri and where all the work is going.

Broken npm install?

If a fresh install of @4da/victauri-browser now 404s and you have a genuine need, please comment here — we can republish a final no-op version to un-break installs. (Existing lockfiles with a cached copy are unaffected.)

Sorry for any disruption. This was a deliberate scope-down before wider adoption, made while real usage was still minimal.

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