Cloudflare has built a brand-new browser engine for AI agents, and it's called Kitesurf. No Chromium here — it runs directly on Cloudflare Workers. The company has opened testing and plans to open-source it later.
Cloudflare's argument? Agents don't need tabs, themes, extensions, or pixel-perfect rendering. So why keep booting up a full Chromium, burning compute and memory?
In testing, Kitesurf cut CPU usage to about a third of Chromium's, and memory down to as little as a seventh. But it's not faster — tasks actually take 70–80% longer. The payoff is efficiency, letting you run more agents at once.
Kitesurf is now integrated with Cloudflare Browser Run, and usable via Puppeteer, Playwright, MCP, and CDP. It's free during the testing period. But video, WebGL, some anti-bot challenges, and long-lived login sessions aren't supported yet — for complex pages, you'll still need Chromium.