From scraping tables and auto-filling forms to auto-saving videos and triggering keyboard macros — here’s how I built a browser automation system entirely in JavaScript, without writing a single Chrome extension.
As a developer, most of my day happens inside a browser — reviewing dashboards, filling out forms, copying stuff from one page to another, downloading files, filtering reports, and sometimes even navigating horrible legacy tools. Most of these actions were repetitive. I was clicking the same buttons 10 times a day, copy-pasting the same fields into 5 different platforms.
I asked myself a simple question: What if I could turn the browser itself into an assistant — without building a full-blown Chrome extension? That’s how this whole journey started. Spoiler: it worked way better than I expected.
The trick was to treat the browser console like my command line. Since every webpage is already a JavaScript runtime, I didn’t need to install anything. I just opened DevTools (F12), pasted my script, and watched the…
