Cloudflare has entered the browser market, but not in the way most people expect. The company released a new browser called Kitesurf. It is not meant for people. It is built for AI agents.
AI agents are computer programs that can complete tasks on their own. Many of these tasks require browsing the internet, filling out forms, or clicking through websites.
Cloudflare said a browser made for AI agents needs different things than one made for people.
How Kitesurf Differs From Regular Browsers
A normal browser needs tabs, bookmarks, and extensions. Kitesurf skips all of that.
Instead, it focuses on managing context windows, keeping performance high, and lowering token costs. These are the resources AI systems use to think and respond.
Cloudflare also pointed out a new kind of risk. AI browsers can face threats like prompt injection attacks, where hidden instructions try to trick the AI into doing something it should not.
Kitesurf runs completely on Cloudflare's serverless platform, called Workers. The company said it built the entire browser in just 12 weeks.
Right now, developers can use Kitesurf for free while it is in beta. It is available through a service called Browser Run.
Browser Run lets developers control headless browser instances directly on Cloudflare's network. A headless browser runs without a visible screen, which fits well with software that has no human sitting in front of it.
Cloudflare says the setup gives AI agents a way to use the web while using less computing power than a browser like Chromium.
The company said Kitesurf uses much less CPU and memory than Chromium for common agent tasks like taking screenshots or pulling data from a webpage.
The Technology Behind Kitesurf
Kitesurf was built using a mix of existing tools. It uses a rendering engine called Blitz, which handles how web pages are displayed.
It also uses Stylo, the CSS parser that Firefox uses to style web pages. For running JavaScript, Kitesurf relies on Boa JS, an engine written in the Rust programming language.
Cloudflare gave credit to an open source project called Obscura for sparking the idea. The company said its first working version of Kitesurf came from porting Obscura onto Workers.
Everything outside of the core rendering pieces runs inside Cloudflare's Workers environment.
Testing is still ongoing, but the early results show progress. Kitesurf already passes more than 215,000 web platform tests, which are used to check if a browser works the way it should.
Cloudflare said it is adding hundreds more tests each week and passing them as it goes.
The company has already tested Kitesurf on real websites. It correctly renders TodoMVC, a common benchmark site for testing JavaScript tools.
It also works on Wikipedia, Hacker News, the Cloudflare Blog, and much of Cloudflare's own dashboard.
Kitesurf remains in beta as Cloudflare keeps building out support for more of the web.
