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Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

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Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#81

Post by nsonha »

dxroshan wrote: post #71

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.

> 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.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#82

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

darkmuck wrote: post #38

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

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?

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#84

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #24
felarof wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 unfort…

I always wonder about what sort of js engine such projects use since at the end of the day imo, it is all just a dance b/w js engine, html and css. Html & Css feels a little solved problem but the problem is of the js engine.

Sciter uses quickjs and I just checked and its like 35-36x times slower than V8 JIT

Also another interesting rabbit hole is that I found Duktape in the quickjs benchmarks and I saw https://blogcpp.org/ as one of the projects within Duktape but I can't even see the project on github. We really need some better way of preserving open source stuff I guess

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#85

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

esperent wrote: post #70
arjunchint wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had this exact thought as well, you don't need a whole browser to implement the agentic capabilities, you can implement the whole thing with the limited permissions of a browser extension. There are plenty of zero day exploit patches that Google immediately rolls out and not to mention all the other features that Google doesn't push to Chromium. I wouldn't trust a random open source project for my day-to-day brows…

> I wouldn't trust a random open source project for my day-to-day browser. Given that you're working on a direct competitor, this comment reads as fearmongering, designed to drive people over to your product.

Conflict of interests at its heart.

I mean, I have no skin in the game but I mean, there are people who are using Dia (browser company) and Dia is closed source so it would be nice to see those people jumping to browser OS atleast.

I personally would prefer it as an extension but there are some limitations as the author of browserOS noted within extensions but I just wish that google/chromium can push those changes upstream I guess.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#86

Post by tunnelfx »

felarof wrote: post #12
layer8 wrote: post #7

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

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++ fo…

How is that accessibility tree different from the “accessibility snapshot” that you can get from Playwright for example?

I was tackling a similar problem few weeks ago and I found that playwright MCP was the most usable solution in my case. It doesn’t use an extension but it debugs the browser tabs (I guess using dev tools protocol) but I agree the experience was suboptimal

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#87

Post by nicoburns »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #24
felarof wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 unfort…

I'm making a new sciter-style webview https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#88

Post by whatevsmate »

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.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#89

Post by cobalt60 »

whatevsmate wrote: post #88

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…

Want you really want is a caretaker ai

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#90

Post by anupj »

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.
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