Xplor

Xplor is a full web browser — a fork of Chromium (the real thing: Blink, V8, the multiprocess sandbox, the whole content layer) modified at the C++ source level to be AI‑native. Every site works, every extension runs, with the sandboxing you expect. Grok is woven in at the core, not bolted on: an agentic side panel, auto‑organized tabs, and agents that run on a schedule or quietly in the background. The same engine exposes a clean local API and a built‑in MCP gateway, so any agent can drive the browser — no launch flags, no setup dance — and the app keeps itself current with in‑app auto‑update.

Platform: macOS — Apple Silicon (arm64) and Intel (x86_64) — Windows x64, and Linux x64. Download the latest release or build from source.

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Contents

• Features
• How it works
• Architecture
• For agents & developers
• Download
• Develop locally
• Project layout
• Contributing
• Star history
• License

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Features

Real, shipping features — not a chat box in a sidebar.

• The "Grok it" button — a floating Grok button on every page. Summarize the long read, fact‑check a claim ("Is this true?"), explain it, or analyze it — the page is handed to Grok in one click.
• Grok Build — describe an app in plain words and Grok writes it, then runs it live in a tab. Watch it build, then keep iterating just by chatting ("make the header sticky") — it edits the app in place, beside a live preview.
• Apps & conversations — every build gets its own folder and a dedicated conversation. Browse the gallery, filter by status, rename, duplicate, export to a zip, or relaunch — your apps and chats stay organized.
• Grok Search home — new tabs open Grok Search (Web and Imagine modes built in). Make the backdrop yours per light/dark mode: a solid color, a gradient, an animated star field, the built‑in landscape, or your own image by drag‑and‑drop.
• One bar for all of Grok — a unified toolbar across Grok Build, Grok Web, Imagine, Groki, and X — on Xplor's own pages and as an overlay on grok.com, x.com, and Grokipedia.
• Agent‑ready & MCP — an always‑on local gateway and a bundled MCP server, so agents like Grok, Claude, and Cursor can drive the browser natively: tabs, navigation, clicks, text extraction, screenshots.

See it in motion on the website.

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How it works

Stock Chrome only exposes the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) when launched with --remote-debugging-port, and treats automation as a second‑class debug mode — a navigator.webdriver flag, an "automation" banner, and a brittle session dance before you can do anything. Agents deserve better, and people deserve Grok woven into browsing rather than stapled on. Xplor is both at once, achieved with a small set of source‑level additions to Chromium:

1. AgentGateway (src/chrome/browser/agent_gateway/) — a component compiled into the browser process that starts automatically at profile load. It serves the full CDP on ws://127.0.0.1:9333 and a higher‑level HTTP Agent API on http://127.0.0.1:9334.
2. First‑class, not intruder — no automation banner and no navigator.webdriver poisoning for gateway sessions. Agents drive tabs while Xplor is in the background; hidden tabs stay live and screenshottable.
3. Local & private — the gateway binds to 127.0.0.1 and is token‑gated. Discovery is a single file: ~/.xplorer/gateway.json.
4. Grok‑native UI (src/chrome/browser/grok_companion/) — the toolbar, the Grok Search new tab, the Apps builder, the "Grok it" button, and the side panel. The UI is plain HTML/CSS/JS served by the gateway and overlaid on Grok's own sites; Grok is wired in as the default search engine.
5. Apps system — "Grok Build" runs the grok CLI as a subprocess inside a per‑app folder; it writes static HTML/CSS/JS, and the gateway hosts the result at /run/<id>/. No bundler, no deploy step.

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Architecture

Xplor is an overlay on Chromium: Chromium is too large to vendor, so the repo is a thin layer (src/ new files + patches/ source edits + companion/ UI) applied on top of an upstream checkout. Keeping the footprint small is deliberate — it's what makes a fork rebaseable against a codebase that ships every ~4 weeks.

flowchart LR
  subgraph clients["Clients"]
    AG["Agents<br/>Grok · Claude · Cursor"]
    PW["Playwright · Puppeteer"]
    YOU["You (browsing)"]
  end

  subgraph proc["Xplorer — Chromium browser process"]
    GW["AgentGateway<br/>Agent API :9334 · CDP :9333"]
    GC["grok_companion<br/>toolbar · Grok‑it button · side panel · search home"]
    APPS["Apps runtime<br/>grok CLI → /run/{id}/"]
    TABS["Tabs · Blink · V8"]
  end

  UI["companion/ui<br/>(bundled HTML/CSS/JS)"]
  DISC["~/.xplorer/gateway.json<br/>(url · token)"]

  AG -- "MCP / HTTP + Bearer" --> GW
  PW -- "raw CDP" --> GW
  YOU --> GC
  GW <--> TABS
  GC --> TABS
  GW --> APPS
  GW -- serves --> UI
  GC -- serves/overlays --> UI
  GW -. writes .-> DISC
  AG -. reads .-> DISC

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For agents & developers

The gateway is the integration surface. Discover it, then talk to it (loopback‑only, token‑gated):

// ~/.xplorer/gateway.json — written at startup
{ "url": "http://127.0.0.1:9334", "cdp_url": "ws://127.0.0.1:9333", "token": "…" }
// Send  Authorization: Bearer <token>  on every Agent API request.

Python SDK (sdk/xplorer_sdk.py, stdlib‑only, auto‑discovers the running browser):

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