[FEATURE]: chrome-devtools MCP tab reuse for agentic sessions

[OSSDeveloper]

Verification

• I have verified this feature hasn't been suggested before.

Problem

When using chrome-devtools MCP for agentic web app development, the agent creates a new browser tab on every action that requires navigation. This leads to:

1. Tab proliferation - dozens of stale tabs accumulate within a single session
2. Resource drain - each tab holds memory, WebSocket connections, and browser context
3. Manual cleanup required - the last open page cannot be programmatically closed, leaving stale tabs that require manual intervention
4. Poor developer experience - a human cannot sit monitoring the agent 24/7 to close tabs

Use Case

Agentic development workflows require persistent browser sessions where:

• Login/authentication state persists across operations
• The agent reuses a single tab for sequential operations on the same web app
• Tabs are created only when genuinely needed (e.g., parallel workflows)
• Browser state is cleaned up when the session ends

Current Workaround

The only current workaround is to use navigate_page instead of new_page to reuse an existing tab - but this requires manual pageId tracking and the agent to "know" to use navigate vs new_page. No automatic reuse logic exists.

Proposed Solution

Add reuse_existing_tab?: boolean parameter to new_page tool. When true (or as default), if a page already exists, return the existing page instead of creating a new one.

Alternative: Add close_stale_tabs parameter to auto-close all pages except the first/default one when creating a new page.

Why This Matters

• Chrome DevTools MCP is the right tool for web app debugging in agentic workflows (CDP protocol access, full DevTools capabilities)
• Playwright is not a replacement for proper DevTools debugging
• Tab reuse is standard expected behavior in browser automation
• Without this, chrome-devtools MCP is impractical for unattended agentic sessions

References

• Related: PR fix: kill orphaned MCP child processes and expose OPENCODE_PID on shu… #15516 introduced OPENCODE_PID for session isolation (acknowledges chrome-devtools MCP session management issues)
• chrome-devtools-mcp: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode_AI_mcp_chrome_devtools

[github-actions]

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[github-actions]

Thanks for updating the issue! It now follows our contributing guidelines and the feature request template correctly. The compliance flag has been removed.