Manus, the viral AI agent platform from Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, has inadvertently boosted the popularity of another AI tool—Browser Use.
Designed to enhance website accessibility for AI-driven applications, Browser Use has seen massive adoption recently. Daily downloads skyrocketed from 5,000 on March 3 to 28,000 by March 10, co-creator Gregor Zunic told TechCrunch.
“The past few days have been crazy,” Zunic said via DM. “We’re GitHub’s top trending repository, getting tons of downloads, and all of it translates to real usage.”The surge began after a post detailing how Manus utilizes Browser Use went viral on X, amassing over 2.4 million views and hundreds of reshares. Browser Use plays a key role in Manus’ workflow, enabling AI to navigate websites, interact with menus, and complete forms.
Zunic co-founded the company behind Browser Use with Magnus Müller last year at ETH Zurich’s Student Project House accelerator. Seeing web agents as a major trend for 2025, they built a prototype in four days, launched it on Hacker News, and hit #1—sparking rapid growth.Browser Use extracts website elements like buttons and widgets to facilitate AI interaction. It manages multiple tabs, handles mouse and keyboard inputs, and executes automated actions.
While the company offers paid plans, its free self-hosted version has surged in popularity post-Manus.Zunic and Müller see themselves as providing “the shovel” for developers chasing the web agent boom. “We wanted to create a foundational layer for browser agents,” Zunic said. “We believe there will be more agents than humans on the web by year’s end.”
Though bold, analysts predict AI agent adoption will soar, with the market reaching $42 billion by 2029.Manus’ success may have simply accelerated Browser Use’s rise at the perfect moment.
