Isolation and browser selection

Isolation guarantees

• Dedicated user data dir: never touches your personal browser profile.
• Dedicated ports: avoids 9222 to prevent collisions with dev workflows.
• Deterministic tab control: tabs returns suggestedTargetId first, then stable tabId handles such as t1, optional labels, and the raw targetId. Agents should reuse suggestedTargetId; raw ids remain available for debugging and compatibility.

Browser selection

When launching locally, OpenClaw picks the first available:

1. Chrome
2. Brave
3. Edge
4. Chromium
5. Chrome Canary

You can override with browser.executablePath.

Platforms:

• macOS: checks /Applications and ~/Applications.
• Linux: checks common Chrome/Brave/Edge/Chromium locations under /usr/bin, /snap/bin, /opt/google, /opt/brave.com, /usr/lib/chromium, and /usr/lib/chromium-browser, plus Playwright-managed Chromium under PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH or ~/.cache/ms-playwright.
• Windows: checks common install locations.

Control API (optional)

For scripting and debugging, the Gateway exposes a small loopback-only HTTP control API plus a matching openclaw browser CLI (snapshots, refs, wait power-ups, JSON output, debug workflows). See Browser control API for the full reference.