Manus, the viral AI agent platform from Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, has unexpectedly boosted the visibility of another AI tool: Browser Use.
Browser Use, designed to make websites more accessible for autonomous AI agents, has seen a massive surge in adoption. Daily downloads skyrocketed from around 5,000 on March 3 to 28,000 on March 10, according to co-creator Gregor Zunic.
“The past few days have been really wild,” Zunic shared with TechCrunch. “We are the biggest trending repository on GitHub, got loads of downloads, and all of that is translating into significant usage numbers.”
The sudden spike in interest can be traced back to a viral post explaining how Manus leverages Browser Use for tasks like navigating site menus and filling out forms. The post amassed over 2.4 million views and sparked hundreds of reshares on X (formerly Twitter), drawing widespread attention to the tool.
The Rise of Browser Use and Web AI Agents
Zunic and his co-founder Magnus Müller launched Browser Use last year through ETH Zurich’s Student Project House accelerator. They anticipated that autonomous web agents—AI-powered tools capable of navigating websites and web applications independently—would become a major trend by 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 built an MVP in four days, launched it, and boom—number one. From there, it’s been an absolute rocket.”
Browser Use enables AI models to interact with websites more effectively by extracting key elements like buttons and widgets. It also supports multi-tab browsing, file management, database operations, and automated keyboard and mouse inputs. While the company offers a managed service for a fee, its free, self-hosted version has fueled the recent surge in adoption following Manus’ success.
Zunic and Müller see their tool as a fundamental building block for the future of web AI agents.
“We wanted to create a foundation layer that everyone will build browser agents on,” Zunic explained. “In our minds, there will be more agents on the web than humans by the end of the year.”
While that may seem ambitious, analysts predict significant growth for AI agents in the near future. Research and Markets estimates the AI agent industry will reach $42 billion by 2029, while Deloitte forecasts that half of all companies using AI will deploy AI agents by 2027.
Regardless of the Manus effect, Browser Use’s momentum couldn’t have come at a better time.
