When working with a Custom Task in Octoparse, you interact with websites through the built-in browser. This browser has two interaction modes:

By default, Octoparse opens websites in Select Mode, where your mouse clicks are used to select elements on the page—for example, selecting a product title, a price, or a button to create an action step. In this mode, you cannot click through the page like you would in a regular browser.

In contrast, Browse Mode transforms the built-in browser into a fully interactive one. When Browse Mode is enabled, you can manually browse the website just like in Chrome or Firefox—you can click links, scroll pages, log in, close popups, or interact with dynamic elements freely.

To toggle between the two modes, simply click the Browse button in the upper right corner of the task editor browser.

Browse Mode is especially useful when the page requires manual interaction before setting up a scraping task. Here are a few common scenarios where Browse Mode can help:

Many websites require you to log in before accessing data. Since credentials and two-step logins can vary from site to site, it's often best to turn on Browse Mode, log in manually, and then switch back to Select Mode to start configuring the scraping steps.

Web pages often have elements that block access to the content — such as “Accept Cookies” banners or modal popups. These can interfere with element selection in Select Mode.

Use Browse Mode to:

Then, switch back to Select Mode to define your data fields and actions.

If the page shows a captcha challenge while you're building a task, you can switch to Browse Mode to solve the captcha manually so that you can continue editing your workflow afterward.