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Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

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Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

#41

Post by felarof »

al_borland wrote: post #25
felarof wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, used gpt4o to generate it. What change do you want to see in that fox appearance? Any change should be a prompt away :)

Why a fox? The browser is based on Chrome. Firefox basically owns having a fox as a mascot in the browser space. Why not pick something original? The fox confusing at best, but some may say misleading. Same goes for the name.

Thanks for the feedback. Honestly—we just reused the icon we had gotten professionally designed for the last idea we were working on (https://felafax.ai/).

But not gonna lie, as a tiny startup, we don’t have marketing budget of Perplexity or Dia, so we picked a name and icon that at least hinted at “browser” right away. Definitely not trying to mislead anyone -- just needed something recognizable out of the gate.

Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

#42

Post by esskay »

felarof wrote: post #22
taylorius wrote: post #20

I'll get voted down, but I hate that cute AI fox, and hope I never see it again.

Haha, used gpt4o to generate it. What change do you want to see in that fox appearance? Any change should be a prompt away :)

For starters, it shouldn't be using a fox. You know why.

Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

#43

Post by felarof »

thisislife2 wrote: post #40

I've upvoted to encourage your initiative, but I personally will not support any "AI" software unless it 100% runs locally and supports old platforms and hardware. Otherwise it is nothing but another conduit to get access to, and suck all my personal data for surveillance capitalism.

> 100% runs locally

Thank you! We have ollama integration already, you can run models locally and use that for AI chat.

Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

#44

Post by felarof »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #31

Is this only for MacOS? If it's a Chromium fork, what's the reason for no Linux/Windows? Also what's the business model?

Yes MacOS for now, but looking into getting Linux binary next.

> what's the reason for no Linux/Windows?

Sorry, just lack of time. Also we use Sparkle for distributing updates, which is MacOS only.

> Also what's the business model?

We are considering an enterprise version of the browser for teams.

Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

#45

Post by mattigames »

felarof wrote: post #24
xena wrote: post #17

Do you respect robots.txt?

No, not today. But wonder if it matter if it the agent is mostly using it for "human" use cases and not scrapping?

What do you mean? This AI cannot scrape multiple links automatically? Like "make a summary of all the recipes linked in this page" kind of stuff? If it can it definitely meets the definition of scraping.

Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

#46

Post by hannob »

Okay, maybe this is a stupid question, but: what is an agentic browser? You seem to assume that everyone knows what that means.

Is this a common and well-defined term that people use? I've never heard it.

It would appear to me from the context that it means something like "web browser with AI stuff tackled on".

Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

#47

Post by bityard »

ilaksh wrote: post #26
wongarsu wrote: post #13

Name derived from Netscape (Firefox's great-grandfather), icon is a red fox, but based on Chrome? Was this originally designed as a Firefox fork or what happened there

Yeah. Regardless, it seems misleading to use that icon with a Chromium fork. Also the fact that it's AGPL means this project is very copyleft and not compatible with business models. I'm not saying that there is no place for copyleft open source anymore, but when it's in a clearly commercial project that makes me question the utility of it being open source.

Being copyleft doesn't mean it's not compatible with business models, it means it's not compatible with exploitative business models.

Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

#48

Post by mattigames »

dotancohen wrote: post #32
ilaksh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Regardless, it seems misleading to use that icon with a Chromium fork. Also the fact that it's AGPL means this project is very copyleft and not compatible with business models. I'm not saying that there is no place for copyleft open source anymore, but when it's in a clearly commercial project that makes me question the utility of it being open source.

> very copyleft and not compatible with business models. Could you explain this for the rest of us? Thanks.

The short answer is that it means that businesses need to publicly share whatever change they do to the code, and that alone is enough deterrent to use it.

Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

#50

Post by abirch »

dotancohen wrote: post #32
ilaksh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Regardless, it seems misleading to use that icon with a Chromium fork. Also the fact that it's AGPL means this project is very copyleft and not compatible with business models. I'm not saying that there is no place for copyleft open source anymore, but when it's in a clearly commercial project that makes me question the utility of it being open source.

> very copyleft and not compatible with business models. Could you explain this for the rest of us? Thanks.

"The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there."

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html

This means that if this company is successful and sells me 1 license, in theory I can request the source code and spin up Dr Evil's voice 1 billion clones and not pay licenses for those.

With other forms of GPL you only have to release the source code if you release the software to the user.

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