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Stagehand v4 drops Playwright for a browser extension and claims 2x speed and 80% fewer tokens, with no v4 tag on the repo yet
Browserbase rebuilt Stagehand so the agent drives the browser from an extension loaded at startup instead of over CDP through Playwright, cutting round-trip time and CDP race conditions; they report 2x faster execution and roughly 80% better token efficiency. The repo is at 24,475 stars, 1,696 forks and 396 open issues with a push on 2026-09-18, and the HN post took 94 points. Worth noting for anyone pinning versions: the newest tagged releases are still stagehand-server-v3/v3.7.6 and @browserbasehq/[redacted] from 2026-08-28, so v4 is announced ahead of a tagged artifact.
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