7 Things I Learned Building a Safari Browser Automation Tool That Chrome Can't Do

Every browser automation tool assumes you're using Chrome. Playwright? Chrome. Puppeteer? Chrome. Selenium? Technically supports others, but let's be real -- Chrome. Even the new wave of AI-powered browser tools (Chrome DevTools MCP, Browserbase) are all Chromium under the hood. I use Safari as my daily browser. I have 47 tabs open right now with active sessions -- Gmail, GitHub, Ahrefs, my hosting dashboards. When I started building AI agents that needed to interact with web pages, every tool told me the same thing: "Just use Chrome." So I spent the last two weeks building Safari MCP -- a native Safari automation server with 80 tools, running entirely through AppleScript and JavaScript injection. No Chrome. No Puppeteer. No headless browser. Here are 7 things I learned that surprised me. 1. WebKit on macOS Is Not What You Think It Is When Playwright says it supports WebKit, it's running a custom build of WebKit in a separate process. It's WebKit the engine, not Safari the application.