14 ms·

Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

291 points by felarof 1y ago

Hey HN, we're a YC startup building an open-source, privacy-first alternative to Perplexity Comet. No invite system unlike bunch of others – you can download it today from our website or GitHub: https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS --- Why bother building an alternative? We believe browsers will become the new operating systems, where we offload much bunch of our work to AI agents. But these agents will have access to all your sensitive data – emails, docs, on top of your browser history. Open-source, privacy-first alternatives need to exist. We're not a search or ad company, so no weird incentives. Your data stays on your machine. You can use local LLMs with Ollama. We also support BYOK (bring your own keys), so no $200/month plans. Another big difference vs Perplexity Comet: our agent runs locally in your browser (not on their server). You can actually watch it click around and do stuff, which is pretty cool! Short demo here: https://bit.ly/browserOS-demo https://bit.ly/browserOS-demo --- How we built? We patch Chromium's C++ source code with our changes, so we have the same security as Google Chrome. We also have an auto-updater for security patches and regular updates. Working with Chromium's 15M lines of C++ has been another fun adventure that I'm writing a blog post on. Cursor/VSCode breaks at this scale, so we're back to using grep to find stuff and make changes. Claude code works surprisingly well too. Building the binary takes ~3 hours on our M4 Max MacBook. --- Next? We're just 2 people with a lot of work ahead (Firefox started with 3 hackers, history rhymes!). But we strongly believe that a privacy-first browser with local LLM support is more important than ever – since agents will have access to so much sensitive data. Looking forward to any and all comments!

deleted 1y ago
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rpastuszak 1y ago
Congrats! How are you planning to make the project sustainable (from a financial, and dev work/maintenance pov)?
- patrickaljord 1y ago
  my guess is it's just an electron app or chromium wrapper with an ollama wrapper to talk to it (there are plenty of free open source libs to control browsers).
  - janalsncm 1y ago
    “Just” is a four-letter word :) When someone in their infinite wisdom decides to refactor an api and deprecate the old one, it creates work for everyone downstream. Maybe as an industry we can agree to do this every so often to keep the LLMs at bay for as long as possible. We can take a page out of the book of the maintainers of moviepy for shuffling their apis around, it definitely keeps everyone on their toes.
  - moscoe 1y ago
    You don’t have to guess, it’s open source
  - felarof 1y ago
    We are a chromium "wrapper" But we are much more performant than other libs (like playwright) which are written in JS, as we implement bunch of changes at chromium source code level -- for example, we are currently implementing a way to build enriched DOMtree required for agent interactions (click, input text, find element) directly at C++ level. We also plan to expose those APIs to devs.
  - lotyrin 1y ago
    No wireless. Less space than a Nomad.
- felarof 1y ago
  Thank you! plan is to sell licenses for Enterprise-version of browser, same as other open-source projects.
eGQjxkKF6fif 1y ago
Whats the roadmap looking like for Linux? I don't have Mac or Windows.
- felarof 1y ago
  this is on our radar, we plan to have it ready by early next week! still a team of 2 people, so bunch things on our plate.
layer8 1y ago
I would prefer this as a browser extension, not as its own browser application.
- felarof 1y ago
  We would've preferred to build this as browser extension too. But we strongly believe that for building a good agent co-pilot we need bunch of changes at Chromium C++ code level. For example, chromium has a accessibility tree for every website, but doesn't expose it as an API to chrome extension. Having access to accessibility tree would greatly improve agent execution. We are also building bunch of changes in C++ for agents to interact with websites -- functions like click, elements with indexes. You can inject JS for doing this but it is 20-40X slower.
  - esafak 1y ago
    Could you upstream that change in order to make it an extension in the future? I think people would not value it any less.
    - felarof 1y ago
      We don't mind upstreaming. But I don't think Google Chrome/Chromium wants to expose it as an API chrome extensions, if not they would've done this long time ago. From Google's perspective, extension are meant to be lightweight applications, with restricted access.
      - jazzyjackson 1y ago
        I'm not really interested in AI agents for my webbrowser, but it would be pretty cool to see a fork of chromium available that, aside from being de-googled, relaxes all the "restricted access" to make it more fun to modify and customize the way you guys are. Just a thought, may be more of a market for the framework more than the product :) See Sciter. A very cool, super lightweight alternative to Electron, but unfortunately it seems like a single developer project and I could never get any of the examples to run. https://sciter.com/ https://sciter.com/
daureg 1y ago
> our agent runs locally in your browser (not on their server) That's definitely a nice feature. Did you measure the impact on laptop battery life in a typical scenario (assuming there is such a scenario at this early stage)
- felarof 1y ago
  The agent running by itself shouldn't impact battery life, it is similar to a lightweight chrome extension and if you think about it, it's an agent browsing the web like human would :) If you run LLMs locally (using Ollama) and use that in our browser, that would impact battery life for sure.
zebomon 1y ago
This is very exciting given the rumor that OpenAI will be launching a (presumably not open source) browser of their own this summer. I've joined your Discord, so will try it soon and report back there. Congrats on launching!
- felarof 1y ago
  Thank you! Browser wars have begun. > that OpenAI will be launching a (presumably not open source) browser of their own this summer. For sure, won't be open-source. I bet in some parallel world, openAI would be non-profit and actually open-source AI :)
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    > Browser wars have begun. Kind of a sad browser war. The majority of these Chromium forks should exist, nor are they particularly viable. Sniffing out which one is going to be successful is obviously the hard problem. Ideally we'd get an extensions API for AI agents and various companies could just release their own plugins. Sadly I don't think the majority is interested, they want to control the "experience".
closetkantian 1y ago
This looks like a great project. What are the system requirements? And shouldn't they be listed on your website?
- felarof 1y ago
  we support Mac (apple silicon and intel) and Windows. hardware requirements are minimal, same as Google Chrome, if you BYOK API keys for agents and are not running LLMs locally.
paul7986 1y ago
So would this or any AI browser go out and fetch a list of the best deals for my trip to Iceland? After Show me all the options it has found for flights, hotels, car rentals and show cheapest/best prices with all details (fly out of and into with times) to even allow me to pay for each item on same page I asked it to do so? As well it could group the overall best deal with details and then i can just click to pay instantly and or make some edits.
- felarof 1y ago
  We just started cooking, very soon you should be able to do this!
- dotancohen 1y ago
  It seems that the next evolution of SEO will be too skip the SE and simply O for the LLMs.
- flymasterv 1y ago
  Orbitz.com has done this for 20 years.
  - paul7986 1y ago
    I can ask Orbitz with one question without going to Orbitz to say create me a full itinerary with the best prices for my Iceland trip? That's advantage of LLMs you dont have to go to the websites and soon you can just talk to your LLM like chatGPT or an advanced Siri to do this and boom it does all the research and shows you the top deals for you to purchase with a click (after you reviewed the prefered one and or talk to the LLM who makes the updates/edits you need before u do one click purchase). If I was Orbitz I would be begging to work with Open AI / chatGPT (use Orbitz API) before Open AI does it themselves. Website visitation is and going to be dropping precipitiously along with the field of web design and development. That's my own field but it's so clear to me as technological evolutions that get adopted are the ones that reduce steps and make things easier to more magical.
ivape 1y ago
What is the default BrowserOS model? Is it local, and if so, what inferencing server are you using?
- felarof 1y ago
  The default model is Gemini. You can bring your own API keys and change the default to any model you local. Or better run model locally using Ollama and use that!
  - ivape 1y ago
    The default is a remote Gemini call?
    - felarof 1y ago
      Yes, right now using Gemini API on our liteLLM server (we can't expose API key on client side). We are working on smaller, fine-tuned model too, which will be the default soon! It should be much faster and precise at navigation tasks.
o_____________o 1y ago
Would love to see this show up on homebrew!
- felarof 1y ago
  Oooh, that's a nice idea! We'll look into doing that!
  - mh- 1y ago
    Making a homebrew recipe is super easy, and you can definitely find an example to draw from that's "shaped" like your app. Highly recommend.
mdaniel 1y ago
> --- How we built? We patch Chromium's C++ source code with our changes, so we have the same security as Google Chrome. We also have an auto-updater for security patches and regular updates. So you rebuild your browser on every Chromium release? Because that's the risk: often changes go into Chromium with very innocent looking commit messages than are released from embargo 90 days later in their CVE reference
- felarof 1y ago
  Good question, so far we have been building on top of chromium release that Google Chrome is based on.
  - mdaniel 1y ago
    I feel as though you overlooked the "every" word in my question. I appreciate you built once, that's a solid accomplishment. If I'm going to be riding your custom build, with your custom C++ changes that introduce their own RCE risk, I want to at least know I'm only vulnerable to your RCE and not your RCE plus the 'just disclosed' RCE for Chromium itself that was actually patched 3 weeks ago but that you didn't bother to track because you don't track Chromium release tags Yes, I'm acutely aware of exactly how much compute pulling off such a stunt requires; what I'm wondering is whether you are aware of exactly how much RCE risk you're running by squatting on someone else's C++ codebase that ships what feels like a vuln-a-week from one of the best funded security research teams in the world
    - swyx 1y ago
      i think you raise a good point but also... how else would you propose to "fork Chrome"? this seems like the most reasonable approach?
      - mdaniel 1y ago
        Well, I wasn't passing judgement upon their forking of Chrome; that's a business decision whether it gets them where they want to go. What I'm saying is that IF you're going to try that stunt, it's just like adopting one of those exotic animals: you need to understand what ongoing upkeep cost you're incurring, not just "oh, hey, I found a jaguar on the side of the road! here, kitty, kitty!" It's also not a rando library that changes 3 times a year and who fucking cares if it has vulns: this is one of the biggest attack surfaces known to mankind given what it does for the user Merely as a "for comparison," rebuilding Firefox takes about an hour on a developer class workstation, which IMHO sure would make tracking upstream a lot less expensive
arjunchint 1y ago
Do you have any benchmarks to share like Halluminate's Web Bench?
- felarof 1y ago
  We working on it! Should have pretty soon!
darkmuck 1y ago
This is similar to the chrome extension nanobrowser. https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser
- lowwave 1y ago
  From a quick scan of the page, they seems to use some kind external LLM API keys. The appear of the poster project seems to be locally run LLM (assuming tranfomer.js ).
- casslin 1y ago
  thanks for the mention!
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Hm just saw this. I think if something can be done as an extension then there is no need to do it as a fork of the existing software. Are there any differences b/w nanobrowser and brwoserOS? like some functionalities that only browserOS could do and not nanobrowser which are worth mentioning?
DANmode 1y ago
Is BrowserOS-OS on the roadmap? (Will you ever make a better FydeOS, or if you're laser-focused, perhaps be open to sharing some with them, so they could?)
- felarof 1y ago
  Yes! We are excited to build BrowserOS-OS! I think with agents the whole UX can be re-imagined. I'll check out FydeOS!
azinman2 1y ago
The demo buying toothpaste shows the difficulty of these tasks. Toothpaste itself was very underspecified, and it essentially randomly chose from a huge list. Some tasks may have past actions that could help guide, others won't have any to inform. Failure cases abound -- maybe the toothpaste you previously bought is no longer available. Then what? Ultimately how much time did this particular example save since you need to double check the result anyway? This is what doomed Alexa for the purchasing experience that Amazon assumed it would enable in the first place. I think it'd be better to show more non-trivial examples where the time savings is clear, and the failure cases are minimized... or even better how it's going to recover from those failure cases. Do I get a bespoke UI for the specific problem? Talk to it via chat? This whole world is non-trivial. Good luck!
- felarof 1y ago
  Great points! For sure, the whole agentic browsers space is still super early. We are also just getting started and trying to narrow down on a high-value niche use-case. There are few repetitive, boring use-cases where time saving could be meaningful -- one example: Walmart 3rd-party sellers routinely (multiple times a day) keep checking prices of the competitor products to price their products appropriately. This could be easily automated with current agentic browsers.
  - byteknight 1y ago
    But in reality, would much more consistently be automated by a single playwright script.
    - felarof 1y ago
      True, there are plenty of libs already available to do such an automation if you are (or can hire a) dev. But for non-technical folks, agentic browsers seems like a good UX to build such and many more automations.
- moneywaters 1y ago
  Yeah it should have your preferences for things to do stuff based on your aesthetics but I see how it could become security nightmare
bkyan 1y ago
Is there a way to hook BrowserOS up as a sub-agent for an orchestration agent/system?
- felarof 1y ago
  Yes! We want to do this. We were thinking of implement MCP protocol into the browser, so the browser can be an MCP server (that exposes bunch of tools -- navigation, click, extract) and you can connect that to your agent, would that work? What is your use-case? Happy to chat on discord! https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr
  - bkyan 1y ago
    Yes, that works for me! My primary use case is automated testing of updates to websites that I maintain.
  - bkyan 1y ago
    Thanks for the discord invite! My username is Mindcast on discord.
    - felarof 1y ago
      thanks for joining! DMed you.
5xpB7n8tdbtoP 1y ago
The windows .zip shared on your github release page gets flagged as a Trojan by windows defender. Why is it a zip in the first place?
- felarof 1y ago
  It is just a warning. We working on getting Microsft Windows signing set up.
thegeek108 1y ago
The name is confused. I think it is a web-based OS in the first place.
- felarof 1y ago
  Hmm, what do you mean? Could you elaborate? Thanks!
  - thegeek108 1y ago
    I mean the name "BrowserOS" made me think it is an Operating System. Congrats to your achieved.
msephton 1y ago
How does the competition do with the same demo tasks?
rvz 1y ago
> But we strongly believe that a privacy-first browser with local LLM support is more important than ever – since agents will have access to so much sensitive data. How does this make money? Surely this will have a cloud offering? But if it doesn't make money, I can only assume that the team will be acqui-hired to answer that question.
- felarof 1y ago
  > How does this make money? Surely this will have a cloud offering? Our plan is to make the consumer version of the browser for free and sell licenses for enterprise version. This is similar to how many open-source projects sustain development. And enterprise browsers are picking up -- Island browser, Talon browser.
  - rvz 1y ago
    > Our plan is to make the consumer version of the browser for free and sell licenses for enterprise version. Makes sense and the software license chosen (AGPL-3.0) also makes sense as well. Sounds like a clear path to monetization and much better than some of the VC backed browser-first companies out there. Good luck.
    - felarof 1y ago
      Thank you!
tzury 1y ago
This is not Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet This is the real thing, the original if you will. As for Perplexity, to me this company and line of product are seemed as the alternative to anything great in AI.
- felarof 1y ago
  Haha, thank you! As a small startup we cannot outspend Perplexity Comet in marketing, so we just said open-source alternative so that people get what we are building.
dxroshan 1y ago
What a joke project! Chromium has a over 35 million lines of code. These people applied a few patches on it, and then advertising it as if they have developed a new browser. The same goes for Comet also. From their GitHub readme: > but Chrome hasn't evolved much in 10 years Really?? It is not true. You guys please go and check release notes and commits log for Chrome/Chromium project for the past 10 years.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 1y ago
  Maybe they're only refering to the frontend/UX. It's true that in 10 years it has not changed much compared to the diff with browserOS.
  - dxroshan 1y ago
    First of all, they didn't say they are referring to the UI. The main element in a web browser's UI is the web view where web pages get rendered. It may look the same 'rectangle' as it used to look 10 years ago. But the way chrome renders web pages and execute JavaScript have undergone a lot of changes over the years. Also they have added a lot of new standard and nonstandard HTML, CSS and JavaScript features. Then, there is WebGL 2.0, WebAssembly, WebGPU, etc.
- nsonha 1y ago
  > joke project Is Chrome an agentic browser at 35 million lines of code? That's what this project does. Whether they're successful at that or not is another story.
matheist 1y ago
> We are also building an LLM-based ad-blocker after Chrome blocked uBlock Origin. Since it's a Chromium fork, why not re-enable uBlock Origin instead?
- Daedren 1y ago
  Chromium will remove the Manifest V2 APIs, and none of these forks want to maintain them. Brave also chose to have their own built-in adblocker. The real question is, why not opt to fork Firefox who is doing that work for them.
  - felarof 1y ago
    +1, enabling uBlock origin could be a short term solution. But we are working on adding built-in adblockers just like Brave + enhancing it to detect more ad formats using lightweight local LLM.
    - mdaniel 1y ago
      > enhancing it to detect more ad formats using lightweight local LLM. So you're going to boot up my_llm.prompt("is this request an ad? %s" % request.copy_as_curl()) for every XHR on the page?! I know this comment is on a page about an AI web browser, but let's turn down the "LLMs cure all problems" a notch
askl 1y ago
The demo looks like a mediocre solution looking for a problem. I can order toothpaste without an LLM faster and more reliably.
oezi 1y ago
Mh, doesn't look like Microsoft has seen this enough: Windows protected your PC Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app from starting. Running this app might put your PC at risk.
whatevsmate 1y ago
I want to see the mouse cursor moving and clicking, and keys typed by the AI appearing onscreen in realtime like you see in software product tutorials. The jumpiness of pages switching and things changing when an AI is driving is extremely disorienting. I find it hard to follow a thread of continuity in the page flashes and ui changes as the bot acts. Right now it’s like watching a screen recording with no hint as to what I’m “supposed” to be focusing on. Regardless - I have use cases for this in the mcp/browser automation vein another user mentioned so super interested to see where this goes.
- cobalt60 1y ago
  Want you really want is a caretaker ai
  - whatevsmate 1y ago
    I’m unclear what it is you’re describing. I’m describing UI affordances.
- felarof 1y ago
  This is very useful feedback, thank you! We will look into add a cursor movements; key typing should already appear like a human would (but probably we can slow it down a bit).
anupj 1y ago
Love the direction here. Local-first, open-source agentic browsers feel inevitable as AI gets more deeply embedded in our workflows. Watching the agent actually click around (vs. black-box cloud APIs) is both reassuring and fun. Curious how you’re handling Chromium’s relentless update pace with such a small team -- Does patching ever break in unexpected ways? Rooting for you; privacy-centric infra like this is long overdue.
- felarof 1y ago
  Thank you for the support! So far our patches have not conflicted with chromium updates. But there are viable ways to do patching and keep up with the pace (Brave Browser has pretty example infra setup to do this).
MasterYoda 1y ago
If this is a privacy first browser, why wasn´t Firefox used when it is much better out of the box for this approach? All security and privacy focused webbrowser use Firefox. Like Tor Browser, Mullvad Browser, LibreWolf etc. Also, I think it is super important we have different "webbrowser engines" and that are independent from big tech companies. If we only have chromium it would be really bad and hurt use consumer really bad and also stop inovation. We really need to support independentCbrowsers like Firefox more.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  I had exactly the same question. You're privacy focused but use chrome as the engine?
  - braebo 1y ago
    Brave is one of the best privacy-first browsers around… more secure than Firefox, and it’s a chromium fork.
- felarof 1y ago
  This was definitely a hard choice. We spoke to folks who had built browser on top of webkit and they spent nearly 2years just fixing random bugs and getting sites to work. I'm sure firefox/gecko engine would probably work better than webkit, but the point still is: if we don't use chromium, a lot of work does have go into fixing website compatibility issues, adding support for extension. We're 2 person startup and chromium codebase was easier to build on top of and provides a solid baseline. And Brave has shown that you can build a privacy-focused browser on top of chromium still. In the agentic browser era, I think there are so many low hanging fruits on privacy which are more important to address -- sending all your sensitive data to Perplexity Comet to sell ads is a pretty bad option right now. Supporting local LLM, letting folks bring their own API keys is crucial.
ertok 1y ago
I use OpenAI deep research feature a ton, what's cool about this is being able to see it do the research live vs. being told just hte steps in text format (I always have to go deeper and copy/paste the sources to verify a) they are real and b) they are credible. Excited to use this
jerrygenser 1y ago
What is your future revenue model?
- felarof 1y ago
  Sell licenses for enterprise browser
avallark 1y ago
Where is my linux version? A lot of researchers who could really use this project would be sitting with a dual gpu setup on a linux machine. Would be an instant hit with the linux community.
anto_pp 1y ago
[flagged]
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  A word of advice, you're a new account and all your comments are about your service, that is why they are marked "dead," ie users will not see them, it's an anti spam measure. Spend more time actually engaging with the community rather than treating HN like a marketing channel and they won't be dead in the future.
dockercompost 1y ago
I didn't realize you all had changed your name and I'd already installed Nxtscape and thought something was wrong when I opened up BrowserOS and saw the same UI and fox emoji icon in the chat. btw I'm not gonna lie, I liked your old name better. I'm guessing you changed it for legal reasons? I tested it out asking it to summarize the comments of an Arstechnica article and at first it said: > I am unable to summarize the comments as the provided page content only contains the article itself, not the comments section. The extract tool does not appear to be able to access the comments on this page. I had to tell it to click on the "comments" link for it to actually start going through the comments. For reference, there's 3 pages of comments and it's taken more than 20 minutes and performed around 100 actions, with lots of those actions being scrolling down a very specific 1074 pixels. I am currently sitting here still waiting for the actual summary while it says "Validating task completion..." Seems like it could be powerful, but the hand holding required and extremely slow speed make it unusable for me at this point. Since I had Nxtscape installed, I tried the same experiment and it successfully did it in less time with fewer actions. Not sure if that's just random chance or if there's different logic running under the hood. One final note: There's a Chrome extension that lets you use your iCloud passwords in Chrome and it doesn't work in either Nxtscape or BrowserOS. I'm not likely to use a browser that requires regularly having to go into my password manager to manually retrieve usernames and passwords, and I'm not changing my password manager for this.
- felarof 1y ago
  Yeah, decided to change the name to avoid any troubles. Also, previous name was hard to pronounce :) Thank you for the feedback. Would love to chat more on discord (https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr) and help you with your use-cases! we are shipping daily and improving things fast, agent should get much better in a few days. > There's a Chrome extension that lets you use your iCloud passwords in Chrome and it doesn't work Will check it out! We definitely want to make onboarding and password mgmt much easier!
xebulon 1y ago
My main gripe - and I cannot sufficiently emphasise how fundamental this is - is that it seems, just as with Comet, this is not actually the integration of LLM agency into the browser. it's using LLMs to pretend to be humans doing things with a browser as a human would, using [a limited subset of] it's UI - the least powerful way to use the web, which is the source of the problem to begin with. I set the same simple task as I set Comet: examine the code resposible for choosing language captions and displaying them with a view to enhance the functionality to display multiple language captions in parallel. This is a high-school exercise, except for how atrocious the HTML can be for any given media-player page. BrowserOS, like Comet, pretends it isn't capable of actually working with the DOM. This is because bad - or, at best, unambitious - design choices have been made as to how the LLM interfaces with the browser. I even made a local HTTP API for Comet to use the MacOS accessibility API (which ironically gives greater scriptable browser control) and it couldn't even make a background HTTP get request with AppleScript to localhost. I suspect BrowserOS will be similarly crippled, although at least I can in theory fix it, unlike with Perplexity's closed-source half-assed Chromium bundling. Can we try a little bit harder, dream a little bigger, imagine how to train, tune and instruct language modes to realistically fight the complexity of web bloat and give the user full programmatic natural-language power to interface with digital services? I don't believe it would take any more effort than has already been employed.
andy_ng 1y ago
I love the vision of a privacy‑first, open‑source browser that runs AI agents locally, but shipping a custom Chromium fork is a huge maintenance lift so how will you handle timely CVE patches? And the demo video on your website is a bit too generic, can you show a more task-specific one?

291 points by felarof 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

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rpastuszak 1y ago

Congrats! How are you planning to make the project sustainable (from a financial, and dev work/maintenance pov)?

patrickaljord 1y ago
my guess is it's just an electron app or chromium wrapper with an ollama wrapper to talk to it (there are plenty of free open source libs to control browsers).
- janalsncm 1y ago
  “Just” is a four-letter word :) When someone in their infinite wisdom decides to refactor an api and deprecate the old one, it creates work for everyone downstream. Maybe as an industry we can agree to do this every so often to keep the LLMs at bay for as long as possible. We can take a page out of the book of the maintainers of moviepy for shuffling their apis around, it definitely keeps everyone on their toes.
- moscoe 1y ago
  You don’t have to guess, it’s open source
- felarof 1y ago
  We are a chromium "wrapper" But we are much more performant than other libs (like playwright) which are written in JS, as we implement bunch of changes at chromium source code level -- for example, we are currently implementing a way to build enriched DOMtree required for agent interactions (click, input text, find element) directly at C++ level. We also plan to expose those APIs to devs.
- lotyrin 1y ago
  No wireless. Less space than a Nomad.
felarof 1y ago
Thank you! plan is to sell licenses for Enterprise-version of browser, same as other open-source projects.

eGQjxkKF6fif 1y ago

Whats the roadmap looking like for Linux? I don't have Mac or Windows.

felarof 1y ago
this is on our radar, we plan to have it ready by early next week! still a team of 2 people, so bunch things on our plate.

layer8 1y ago

I would prefer this as a browser extension, not as its own browser application.

felarof 1y ago
We would've preferred to build this as browser extension too. But we strongly believe that for building a good agent co-pilot we need bunch of changes at Chromium C++ code level. For example, chromium has a accessibility tree for every website, but doesn't expose it as an API to chrome extension. Having access to accessibility tree would greatly improve agent execution. We are also building bunch of changes in C++ for agents to interact with websites -- functions like click, elements with indexes. You can inject JS for doing this but it is 20-40X slower.
- esafak 1y ago
  Could you upstream that change in order to make it an extension in the future? I think people would not value it any less.
  - felarof 1y ago
    We don't mind upstreaming. But I don't think Google Chrome/Chromium wants to expose it as an API chrome extensions, if not they would've done this long time ago. From Google's perspective, extension are meant to be lightweight applications, with restricted access.
    - jazzyjackson 1y ago
      I'm not really interested in AI agents for my webbrowser, but it would be pretty cool to see a fork of chromium available that, aside from being de-googled, relaxes all the "restricted access" to make it more fun to modify and customize the way you guys are. Just a thought, may be more of a market for the framework more than the product :) See Sciter. A very cool, super lightweight alternative to Electron, but unfortunately it seems like a single developer project and I could never get any of the examples to run. https://sciter.com/ https://sciter.com/

daureg 1y ago

> our agent runs locally in your browser (not on their server) That's definitely a nice feature. Did you measure the impact on laptop battery life in a typical scenario (assuming there is such a scenario at this early stage)

felarof 1y ago
The agent running by itself shouldn't impact battery life, it is similar to a lightweight chrome extension and if you think about it, it's an agent browsing the web like human would :) If you run LLMs locally (using Ollama) and use that in our browser, that would impact battery life for sure.

zebomon 1y ago

This is very exciting given the rumor that OpenAI will be launching a (presumably not open source) browser of their own this summer. I've joined your Discord, so will try it soon and report back there. Congrats on launching!

felarof 1y ago
Thank you! Browser wars have begun. > that OpenAI will be launching a (presumably not open source) browser of their own this summer. For sure, won't be open-source. I bet in some parallel world, openAI would be non-profit and actually open-source AI :)
- mrweasel 1y ago
  > Browser wars have begun. Kind of a sad browser war. The majority of these Chromium forks should exist, nor are they particularly viable. Sniffing out which one is going to be successful is obviously the hard problem. Ideally we'd get an extensions API for AI agents and various companies could just release their own plugins. Sadly I don't think the majority is interested, they want to control the "experience".

closetkantian 1y ago

This looks like a great project. What are the system requirements? And shouldn't they be listed on your website?

felarof 1y ago
we support Mac (apple silicon and intel) and Windows. hardware requirements are minimal, same as Google Chrome, if you BYOK API keys for agents and are not running LLMs locally.

paul7986 1y ago

So would this or any AI browser go out and fetch a list of the best deals for my trip to Iceland? After Show me all the options it has found for flights, hotels, car rentals and show cheapest/best prices with all details (fly out of and into with times) to even allow me to pay for each item on same page I asked it to do so? As well it could group the overall best deal with details and then i can just click to pay instantly and or make some edits.

felarof 1y ago
We just started cooking, very soon you should be able to do this!
dotancohen 1y ago
It seems that the next evolution of SEO will be too skip the SE and simply O for the LLMs.
flymasterv 1y ago
Orbitz.com has done this for 20 years.
- paul7986 1y ago
  I can ask Orbitz with one question without going to Orbitz to say create me a full itinerary with the best prices for my Iceland trip? That's advantage of LLMs you dont have to go to the websites and soon you can just talk to your LLM like chatGPT or an advanced Siri to do this and boom it does all the research and shows you the top deals for you to purchase with a click (after you reviewed the prefered one and or talk to the LLM who makes the updates/edits you need before u do one click purchase). If I was Orbitz I would be begging to work with Open AI / chatGPT (use Orbitz API) before Open AI does it themselves. Website visitation is and going to be dropping precipitiously along with the field of web design and development. That's my own field but it's so clear to me as technological evolutions that get adopted are the ones that reduce steps and make things easier to more magical.

ivape 1y ago

What is the default BrowserOS model? Is it local, and if so, what inferencing server are you using?

felarof 1y ago
The default model is Gemini. You can bring your own API keys and change the default to any model you local. Or better run model locally using Ollama and use that!
- ivape 1y ago
  The default is a remote Gemini call?
  - felarof 1y ago
    Yes, right now using Gemini API on our liteLLM server (we can't expose API key on client side). We are working on smaller, fine-tuned model too, which will be the default soon! It should be much faster and precise at navigation tasks.

o_____________o 1y ago

Would love to see this show up on homebrew!

felarof 1y ago
Oooh, that's a nice idea! We'll look into doing that!
- mh- 1y ago
  Making a homebrew recipe is super easy, and you can definitely find an example to draw from that's "shaped" like your app. Highly recommend.

mdaniel 1y ago

> --- How we built? We patch Chromium's C++ source code with our changes, so we have the same security as Google Chrome. We also have an auto-updater for security patches and regular updates. So you rebuild your browser on every Chromium release? Because that's the risk: often changes go into Chromium with very innocent looking commit messages than are released from embargo 90 days later in their CVE reference

felarof 1y ago
Good question, so far we have been building on top of chromium release that Google Chrome is based on.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  I feel as though you overlooked the "every" word in my question. I appreciate you built once, that's a solid accomplishment. If I'm going to be riding your custom build, with your custom C++ changes that introduce their own RCE risk, I want to at least know I'm only vulnerable to your RCE and not your RCE plus the 'just disclosed' RCE for Chromium itself that was actually patched 3 weeks ago but that you didn't bother to track because you don't track Chromium release tags Yes, I'm acutely aware of exactly how much compute pulling off such a stunt requires; what I'm wondering is whether you are aware of exactly how much RCE risk you're running by squatting on someone else's C++ codebase that ships what feels like a vuln-a-week from one of the best funded security research teams in the world
  - swyx 1y ago
    i think you raise a good point but also... how else would you propose to "fork Chrome"? this seems like the most reasonable approach?
    - mdaniel 1y ago
      Well, I wasn't passing judgement upon their forking of Chrome; that's a business decision whether it gets them where they want to go. What I'm saying is that IF you're going to try that stunt, it's just like adopting one of those exotic animals: you need to understand what ongoing upkeep cost you're incurring, not just "oh, hey, I found a jaguar on the side of the road! here, kitty, kitty!" It's also not a rando library that changes 3 times a year and who fucking cares if it has vulns: this is one of the biggest attack surfaces known to mankind given what it does for the user Merely as a "for comparison," rebuilding Firefox takes about an hour on a developer class workstation, which IMHO sure would make tracking upstream a lot less expensive

arjunchint 1y ago

Do you have any benchmarks to share like Halluminate's Web Bench?

felarof 1y ago
We working on it! Should have pretty soon!

darkmuck 1y ago

This is similar to the chrome extension nanobrowser. https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser

lowwave 1y ago
From a quick scan of the page, they seems to use some kind external LLM API keys. The appear of the poster project seems to be locally run LLM (assuming tranfomer.js ).
casslin 1y ago
thanks for the mention!
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Hm just saw this. I think if something can be done as an extension then there is no need to do it as a fork of the existing software. Are there any differences b/w nanobrowser and brwoserOS? like some functionalities that only browserOS could do and not nanobrowser which are worth mentioning?

DANmode 1y ago

Is BrowserOS-OS on the roadmap? (Will you ever make a better FydeOS, or if you're laser-focused, perhaps be open to sharing some with them, so they could?)

felarof 1y ago
Yes! We are excited to build BrowserOS-OS! I think with agents the whole UX can be re-imagined. I'll check out FydeOS!

azinman2 1y ago

The demo buying toothpaste shows the difficulty of these tasks. Toothpaste itself was very underspecified, and it essentially randomly chose from a huge list. Some tasks may have past actions that could help guide, others won't have any to inform. Failure cases abound -- maybe the toothpaste you previously bought is no longer available. Then what? Ultimately how much time did this particular example save since you need to double check the result anyway? This is what doomed Alexa for the purchasing experience that Amazon assumed it would enable in the first place. I think it'd be better to show more non-trivial examples where the time savings is clear, and the failure cases are minimized... or even better how it's going to recover from those failure cases. Do I get a bespoke UI for the specific problem? Talk to it via chat? This whole world is non-trivial. Good luck!

felarof 1y ago
Great points! For sure, the whole agentic browsers space is still super early. We are also just getting started and trying to narrow down on a high-value niche use-case. There are few repetitive, boring use-cases where time saving could be meaningful -- one example: Walmart 3rd-party sellers routinely (multiple times a day) keep checking prices of the competitor products to price their products appropriately. This could be easily automated with current agentic browsers.
- byteknight 1y ago
  But in reality, would much more consistently be automated by a single playwright script.
  - felarof 1y ago
    True, there are plenty of libs already available to do such an automation if you are (or can hire a) dev. But for non-technical folks, agentic browsers seems like a good UX to build such and many more automations.
moneywaters 1y ago
Yeah it should have your preferences for things to do stuff based on your aesthetics but I see how it could become security nightmare

bkyan 1y ago

Is there a way to hook BrowserOS up as a sub-agent for an orchestration agent/system?

felarof 1y ago
Yes! We want to do this. We were thinking of implement MCP protocol into the browser, so the browser can be an MCP server (that exposes bunch of tools -- navigation, click, extract) and you can connect that to your agent, would that work? What is your use-case? Happy to chat on discord! https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr
- bkyan 1y ago
  Yes, that works for me! My primary use case is automated testing of updates to websites that I maintain.
- bkyan 1y ago
  Thanks for the discord invite! My username is Mindcast on discord.
  - felarof 1y ago
    thanks for joining! DMed you.

5xpB7n8tdbtoP 1y ago

The windows .zip shared on your github release page gets flagged as a Trojan by windows defender. Why is it a zip in the first place?

felarof 1y ago
It is just a warning. We working on getting Microsft Windows signing set up.

thegeek108 1y ago

The name is confused. I think it is a web-based OS in the first place.

felarof 1y ago
Hmm, what do you mean? Could you elaborate? Thanks!
- thegeek108 1y ago
  I mean the name "BrowserOS" made me think it is an Operating System. Congrats to your achieved.

msephton 1y ago

How does the competition do with the same demo tasks?

rvz 1y ago

> But we strongly believe that a privacy-first browser with local LLM support is more important than ever – since agents will have access to so much sensitive data. How does this make money? Surely this will have a cloud offering? But if it doesn't make money, I can only assume that the team will be acqui-hired to answer that question.

felarof 1y ago
> How does this make money? Surely this will have a cloud offering? Our plan is to make the consumer version of the browser for free and sell licenses for enterprise version. This is similar to how many open-source projects sustain development. And enterprise browsers are picking up -- Island browser, Talon browser.
- rvz 1y ago
  > Our plan is to make the consumer version of the browser for free and sell licenses for enterprise version. Makes sense and the software license chosen (AGPL-3.0) also makes sense as well. Sounds like a clear path to monetization and much better than some of the VC backed browser-first companies out there. Good luck.
  - felarof 1y ago
    Thank you!

tzury 1y ago

This is not Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet This is the real thing, the original if you will. As for Perplexity, to me this company and line of product are seemed as the alternative to anything great in AI.

felarof 1y ago
Haha, thank you! As a small startup we cannot outspend Perplexity Comet in marketing, so we just said open-source alternative so that people get what we are building.

dxroshan 1y ago

What a joke project! Chromium has a over 35 million lines of code. These people applied a few patches on it, and then advertising it as if they have developed a new browser. The same goes for Comet also. From their GitHub readme: > but Chrome hasn't evolved much in 10 years Really?? It is not true. You guys please go and check release notes and commits log for Chrome/Chromium project for the past 10 years.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 1y ago
Maybe they're only refering to the frontend/UX. It's true that in 10 years it has not changed much compared to the diff with browserOS.
- dxroshan 1y ago
  First of all, they didn't say they are referring to the UI. The main element in a web browser's UI is the web view where web pages get rendered. It may look the same 'rectangle' as it used to look 10 years ago. But the way chrome renders web pages and execute JavaScript have undergone a lot of changes over the years. Also they have added a lot of new standard and nonstandard HTML, CSS and JavaScript features. Then, there is WebGL 2.0, WebAssembly, WebGPU, etc.
nsonha 1y ago
> joke project Is Chrome an agentic browser at 35 million lines of code? That's what this project does. Whether they're successful at that or not is another story.

matheist 1y ago

> We are also building an LLM-based ad-blocker after Chrome blocked uBlock Origin. Since it's a Chromium fork, why not re-enable uBlock Origin instead?

Daedren 1y ago
Chromium will remove the Manifest V2 APIs, and none of these forks want to maintain them. Brave also chose to have their own built-in adblocker. The real question is, why not opt to fork Firefox who is doing that work for them.
- felarof 1y ago
  +1, enabling uBlock origin could be a short term solution. But we are working on adding built-in adblockers just like Brave + enhancing it to detect more ad formats using lightweight local LLM.
  - mdaniel 1y ago
    > enhancing it to detect more ad formats using lightweight local LLM. So you're going to boot up my_llm.prompt("is this request an ad? %s" % request.copy_as_curl()) for every XHR on the page?! I know this comment is on a page about an AI web browser, but let's turn down the "LLMs cure all problems" a notch

askl 1y ago

The demo looks like a mediocre solution looking for a problem. I can order toothpaste without an LLM faster and more reliably.

oezi 1y ago

Mh, doesn't look like Microsoft has seen this enough: Windows protected your PC Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app from starting. Running this app might put your PC at risk.

whatevsmate 1y ago

I want to see the mouse cursor moving and clicking, and keys typed by the AI appearing onscreen in realtime like you see in software product tutorials. The jumpiness of pages switching and things changing when an AI is driving is extremely disorienting. I find it hard to follow a thread of continuity in the page flashes and ui changes as the bot acts. Right now it’s like watching a screen recording with no hint as to what I’m “supposed” to be focusing on. Regardless - I have use cases for this in the mcp/browser automation vein another user mentioned so super interested to see where this goes.

cobalt60 1y ago
Want you really want is a caretaker ai
- whatevsmate 1y ago
  I’m unclear what it is you’re describing. I’m describing UI affordances.
felarof 1y ago
This is very useful feedback, thank you! We will look into add a cursor movements; key typing should already appear like a human would (but probably we can slow it down a bit).

anupj 1y ago

Love the direction here. Local-first, open-source agentic browsers feel inevitable as AI gets more deeply embedded in our workflows. Watching the agent actually click around (vs. black-box cloud APIs) is both reassuring and fun. Curious how you’re handling Chromium’s relentless update pace with such a small team -- Does patching ever break in unexpected ways? Rooting for you; privacy-centric infra like this is long overdue.

felarof 1y ago
Thank you for the support! So far our patches have not conflicted with chromium updates. But there are viable ways to do patching and keep up with the pace (Brave Browser has pretty example infra setup to do this).

MasterYoda 1y ago

If this is a privacy first browser, why wasn´t Firefox used when it is much better out of the box for this approach? All security and privacy focused webbrowser use Firefox. Like Tor Browser, Mullvad Browser, LibreWolf etc. Also, I think it is super important we have different "webbrowser engines" and that are independent from big tech companies. If we only have chromium it would be really bad and hurt use consumer really bad and also stop inovation. We really need to support independentCbrowsers like Firefox more.

lelanthran 1y ago
I had exactly the same question. You're privacy focused but use chrome as the engine?
- braebo 1y ago
  Brave is one of the best privacy-first browsers around… more secure than Firefox, and it’s a chromium fork.
felarof 1y ago
This was definitely a hard choice. We spoke to folks who had built browser on top of webkit and they spent nearly 2years just fixing random bugs and getting sites to work. I'm sure firefox/gecko engine would probably work better than webkit, but the point still is: if we don't use chromium, a lot of work does have go into fixing website compatibility issues, adding support for extension. We're 2 person startup and chromium codebase was easier to build on top of and provides a solid baseline. And Brave has shown that you can build a privacy-focused browser on top of chromium still. In the agentic browser era, I think there are so many low hanging fruits on privacy which are more important to address -- sending all your sensitive data to Perplexity Comet to sell ads is a pretty bad option right now. Supporting local LLM, letting folks bring their own API keys is crucial.

ertok 1y ago

I use OpenAI deep research feature a ton, what's cool about this is being able to see it do the research live vs. being told just hte steps in text format (I always have to go deeper and copy/paste the sources to verify a) they are real and b) they are credible. Excited to use this

jerrygenser 1y ago

What is your future revenue model?

felarof 1y ago
Sell licenses for enterprise browser

avallark 1y ago

Where is my linux version? A lot of researchers who could really use this project would be sitting with a dual gpu setup on a linux machine. Would be an instant hit with the linux community.

anto_pp 1y ago

[flagged]

satvikpendem 1y ago
A word of advice, you're a new account and all your comments are about your service, that is why they are marked "dead," ie users will not see them, it's an anti spam measure. Spend more time actually engaging with the community rather than treating HN like a marketing channel and they won't be dead in the future.

dockercompost 1y ago

I didn't realize you all had changed your name and I'd already installed Nxtscape and thought something was wrong when I opened up BrowserOS and saw the same UI and fox emoji icon in the chat. btw I'm not gonna lie, I liked your old name better. I'm guessing you changed it for legal reasons? I tested it out asking it to summarize the comments of an Arstechnica article and at first it said: > I am unable to summarize the comments as the provided page content only contains the article itself, not the comments section. The extract tool does not appear to be able to access the comments on this page. I had to tell it to click on the "comments" link for it to actually start going through the comments. For reference, there's 3 pages of comments and it's taken more than 20 minutes and performed around 100 actions, with lots of those actions being scrolling down a very specific 1074 pixels. I am currently sitting here still waiting for the actual summary while it says "Validating task completion..." Seems like it could be powerful, but the hand holding required and extremely slow speed make it unusable for me at this point. Since I had Nxtscape installed, I tried the same experiment and it successfully did it in less time with fewer actions. Not sure if that's just random chance or if there's different logic running under the hood. One final note: There's a Chrome extension that lets you use your iCloud passwords in Chrome and it doesn't work in either Nxtscape or BrowserOS. I'm not likely to use a browser that requires regularly having to go into my password manager to manually retrieve usernames and passwords, and I'm not changing my password manager for this.

felarof 1y ago
Yeah, decided to change the name to avoid any troubles. Also, previous name was hard to pronounce :) Thank you for the feedback. Would love to chat more on discord (https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr) and help you with your use-cases! we are shipping daily and improving things fast, agent should get much better in a few days. > There's a Chrome extension that lets you use your iCloud passwords in Chrome and it doesn't work Will check it out! We definitely want to make onboarding and password mgmt much easier!

xebulon 1y ago

My main gripe - and I cannot sufficiently emphasise how fundamental this is - is that it seems, just as with Comet, this is not actually the integration of LLM agency into the browser. it's using LLMs to pretend to be humans doing things with a browser as a human would, using [a limited subset of] it's UI - the least powerful way to use the web, which is the source of the problem to begin with. I set the same simple task as I set Comet: examine the code resposible for choosing language captions and displaying them with a view to enhance the functionality to display multiple language captions in parallel. This is a high-school exercise, except for how atrocious the HTML can be for any given media-player page. BrowserOS, like Comet, pretends it isn't capable of actually working with the DOM. This is because bad - or, at best, unambitious - design choices have been made as to how the LLM interfaces with the browser. I even made a local HTTP API for Comet to use the MacOS accessibility API (which ironically gives greater scriptable browser control) and it couldn't even make a background HTTP get request with AppleScript to localhost. I suspect BrowserOS will be similarly crippled, although at least I can in theory fix it, unlike with Perplexity's closed-source half-assed Chromium bundling. Can we try a little bit harder, dream a little bigger, imagine how to train, tune and instruct language modes to realistically fight the complexity of web bloat and give the user full programmatic natural-language power to interface with digital services? I don't believe it would take any more effort than has already been employed.

andy_ng 1y ago

I love the vision of a privacy‑first, open‑source browser that runs AI agents locally, but shipping a custom Chromium fork is a huge maintenance lift so how will you handle timely CVE patches? And the demo video on your website is a bit too generic, can you show a more task-specific one?