I asked Claude Code to summarize my unfulfilled Shopify orders this morning. Claude reached for its browser tool. The tool opened a fresh Chromium, navigated to admin.shopify.com , and came back with: "Log in to continue."

Of course. My browser is logged in. Claude's browser isn't.

This isn't a missing feature. It's an architectural property of where the browser runs.

What each MCP browser tool actually does

Pull their source. What browser_navigate and browser_extract actually mean differs by tool:

Tool Browser runs in Session state Can access your Shopify admin?

Playwright MCP Fresh Chromium, spawned per session Empty No

Browserbase MCP Managed cloud Chromium Empty No

Firecrawl MCP Server-side crawler Public web only No

Stagehand (via MCP wrapper) Fresh Playwright Empty unless cookies injected No

Bardeen (Chrome extension) Your Chrome Your real session Yes — but no MCP, visual-only

Four technically excellent tools, all architecturally blind to 90% of your web workflow: SaaS accounts, vendor…