My MCP Server Was 2x Larger Than Playwright. Now It's 136x Smaller.

I built Charlotte, an open source browser MCP server that gives AI agents structured access to web pages. Navigation, observation, interaction, auditing. 40 tools across 6 categories, powered by headless Chromium. When I first benchmarked it against Playwright MCP (Microsoft's browser MCP server), I expected Charlotte to be smaller. Structured representations should beat raw accessibility trees, right? Charlotte was bigger . Not by a little. By a lot. The Embarrassing First Benchmark I ran both servers against the same pages and compared what the agent actually received. Here's what I found: Page Charlotte v0.1.3 Playwright MCP Ratio ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Wikipedia 1,957,532 ch 1,040,636 ch 1.88x LARGER GitHub repo 150,541 ch 80,297 ch 1.88x LARGER Hacker News 156,897 ch 61,230 ch 2.56x LARGER My structured, "agent-optimized" server was returning almost twice as much data as the tool that just dumps the accessibility tree. On Hacker News it was 2