TideSurf: DOM compression tool reduces web agent token usage 30x, speeds TTFT 12x

What TideSurf does

TideSurf is a tool that addresses a common problem with browser use agents: they often rely on models' native multimodality over concrete page sources, and even when they use page sources, they consume excessive context tokens. The solution converts rendered DOM to a markdown-like compressed format before sending it to LLM agents.

Performance improvements

According to experiments with GitHub pages, TideSurf reduces token consumption by 32 times compared to raw DOM. The parsing process takes approximately 30ms. In specific tests with Qwen 3.5 9B (reasoning off, Q8 KV Cache quant, other configs default) on a MacBook Pro 14" Late 2021 (M1 Pro, 14C GPU, 16GB LPDDR5 Unified Memory, MacOS Tahoe 26.2) using LM Studio 0.4.7-b2 with MLX runtime:

• Tokens per second: 24.788 (raw DOM) vs 26.123 (TideSurf)
• Time to first token: 106.641s vs 8.442s (12.6x reduction)
• Generation time: 9.117s vs 6.163s
• Prompt tokens: 17,371 vs 3,312 (including tool definitions)
• Inference tokens: 226 vs 161

Tool capabilities

TideSurf includes 18 tools for LLMs to work interactively with web pages. These tools work with any model that has tool calling capabilities. The system supports both CLI and MCP (Model Context Protocol) interfaces.

Current status and availability

This is an early project at version 0.3, and the developer is seeking feedback. TideSurf is available as an npm package (@tidesurf/core), with documentation at tidesurf.org/docs and source code on GitHub.