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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

#81
post #26

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.

Huh? It's a good thing that it's AGPL. That license explicitly allows commercial use, and only bans proprietary forks/modifications.

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

#82
post #71
post #63

I think LLMs could have a reasonable chance at solving tab-related workflows (keeping track of tabs or the idea/concept of tabs) - that is tracking and sorting lots of small related research ideas. Sort of like a backwards perplexity search. (LLM context is from open tabs rather than the tool that brings you to those tabs) I built a tab manager extension a long time ago that people used but ran into the same problem-…

Yeah, I feel LLMs can finally solve the tab overload issue. I suffer from this constantly. I added few features which I felt would be useful - easy way to organise and group tabs - simple way to save and resume sessions with selective context. What are your problems that you would like to see solved?

I don't like the idea of letting the LLM run wild and categorize things directly, but in a tab-organizing view it would be useful to add more semantic sorting of the tabs- maybe it would enable something like multiple tab-view control panel: Show all the AI tabs. Show all the image diffusion tabs. Show all the LLM tabs. (so overlapping views of sets of tabs)

This would of course apply to not just open tabs but tabs I used to have open, where the LLM knows about my browsing history.

But I think I would want a non-chat interface for this. (of course at any time I could chat/ask a question as well)

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

#83
post #36

AOL still have active trademarks for “Netscape” which might trouble you here: - https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=76017078&caseSearchType=U... > PROVIDING MULTIPLE-USER ACCESS TO A GLOBAL COMPUTER INFORMATION NETWORK FOR THE TRANSFER AND DISSEMINATION OF A WIDE RANGE OF INFORMATION; ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION OF DATA, IMAGES, AND DOCUMENTS VIA COMPUTER NETWORKS; [ELECTRONIC MAIL SERVICES; PROVIDING ON-LINE CHAT ROOMS F…

And in case someone is wondering if Yahoo can be said to have abandoned the mark by disuse, it seems like http://isp.netscape.com is still up, so they have their bases covered.

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

#84
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for asking - not a stupid question at all! I should have probably explained it at the top of my post. By "agentic browser" we basically mean a browser with AI agents that can do web navigation tasks for you. So instead of you manually clicking around to reorder something on Amazon or fill out forms, the AI agent can actually navigate the site and do those tasks.

Not to pull a "why should I use Dropbox when I have rsync" but why should we use this over adding a Playwright MCP to Claude Desktop or similar? Does having access to Chromium internals give you any super powers over connecting over the Chrome Devtools Protocol?

I would take the position of "why use this when I have eyes and hands and a brain?"

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

#87
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to pull a "why should I use Dropbox when I have rsync" but why should we use this over adding a Playwright MCP to Claude Desktop or similar? Does having access to Chromium internals give you any super powers over connecting over the Chrome Devtools Protocol?

Yes, eventually we think there is more value of owning the entire stack than just be a MCP connector. Few ideas we were thinking of: integrating a small LLM, building MCP store into browser, building a more AI friendly DOM, etc. Even today, we use chrome's accessibility tree (a better representation of DOM for LLMs) which is not exposed via chrome extension APIs.

> building a more AI friendly DOM

You might consider the Accessibility Tree and its semantics. Plain divs are basically filtered out so you're left with interactive objects and some structural/layout cues.

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

#90
post #36

AOL still have active trademarks for “Netscape” which might trouble you here: - https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=76017078&caseSearchType=U... > PROVIDING MULTIPLE-USER ACCESS TO A GLOBAL COMPUTER INFORMATION NETWORK FOR THE TRANSFER AND DISSEMINATION OF A WIDE RANGE OF INFORMATION; ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION OF DATA, IMAGES, AND DOCUMENTS VIA COMPUTER NETWORKS; [ELECTRONIC MAIL SERVICES; PROVIDING ON-LINE CHAT ROOMS F…

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