What is live view in browser automation?
Live view streams an active browser session as a real-time visual feed so you can see exactly what the browser is doing while automation runs. Two modes exist: read-only streams (for monitoring dashboards and observability) and interactive streams (where a human can take over the mouse and keyboard directly). Without live view, debugging automated sessions means parsing logs after the fact; with it, you can observe, intervene, and verify in real time without needing direct server access.
| Factor | Read-only live view | Interactive live view |
|---|---|---|
| Human control | Observe only | Full mouse and keyboard takeover |
| Primary use case | Monitoring dashboards, debugging | Human-in-the-loop review, CAPTCHA handling |
| Embeddable in UI | Yes | Yes |
| Automation continues | Uninterrupted | Pauses for human input |
Live view is most useful when automated steps occasionally need human review: verifying a form fill before submission, handling unexpected CAPTCHAs, or confirming that the browser reached the correct page before extraction. Teams embed read-only streams in internal tools to monitor long-running scrapes, while interactive streams let an operator take over a session when the automation encounters something it cannot handle on its own.
Firecrawl's /interact endpoint returns both a liveViewUrl (read-only) and an interactiveLiveViewUrl (full human takeover) in every interaction response, making it simple to build tools that combine automated scraping with human-in-the-loop review.
data from the web