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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

#121

Post by dvt »

brulard wrote: post #116
dvt wrote: post #104

Suffers from the same problem as all other AI "workflows"--no one wants to fucking chat with a computer (Brave sort-of does this, and it's god-awful). A chat interface should only be used as a fallback if the agent is too dumb to figure out what I want. A chat interface works for ChatGPT because most folks use it as a pseudo-search, but productivity tools are (broadly speaking) not generative, therefore shouldn't be…

What do you see as an alternative? This is exactly what people need. To give quick instructions and have agent work on tasks across webpages/webapps. You say you "have many thoughts on fixing this". Can you share a better vision?

Yes, it involves "recipes" for different "action types" based on a few things (past behavior, sensible "default" behavior, the context, etc.). For example, when looking at a storefront, the agent might want to give a few options (off the top of my head):

    - It knows you're low on milk, so it suggests buying milk
    - It can get a list of all deals, maybe even cross-checking with other storefronts
    - It knows your sister was looking for a planter, and it found a particularly cheap one, so it suggests texting it to her
    - Etc.
    - (You can of course still chat with the thing, if you so desire)
These recipes are difficult to come up with and hard to generalize (they also need to be categorized, and likely accurately picked from a [RAG?] database), but imo this is the future if AI agents, not yet another chatbox.

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

#122

Post by lolinder »

vharish wrote: post #110
grepexdev wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what he means is it is not just generally crawling and scraping, and uses a more targeted approach. Equivalent to a user going to each of those sites, just more efficiently.

I'm guessing that would ideally mean only reading the content the user would otherwise have gone through. I wonder if that's the case and if it's guaranteed. Maybe some new standards and maybe a user configurable per site permissions may make it better? I'm curious to see how this will turn out to be.

> only reading the content the user would otherwise have gone through.

Why? My user agent is configured to make things easier for me and allow me to access content that I wouldn't otherwise choose to access. Dark mode allows me to read late at night. Reader mode allows me to read content that would otherwise be unbearably cluttered. I can zoom in on small text to better see it.

Should my reader mode or dark mode or zoom feature have to respect robots.txt because otherwise they'd allow me to access content that I would otherwise have chosen to leave alone?

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

#124

Post by ugh123 »

felarof wrote: post #14
jklinger410 wrote: post #7

What is with Mac users forking Chromium and then only making releases for Mac?

Haha, was easier to build and we were the first users :) have linux next on our radar. What build do you want?

I think it makes sense to move fast on a platform you understand and get the featureset solid. Worry about linux, deb packages later

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

#126

Post by mullingitover »

On the one hand: an agentic browser sounds like a cool idea. Being able to automate things with an agent on the client side is crazy powerful.

On the other hand: this has the potential to be an absolute security Chernobyl. A browser is likely to be logged into all your sensitive accounts. An agent in your browser is probably going to be exposed to untrusted inputs from the internet by its very nature.

You have the potential for prompt injection to turn your life upside down in a matter of seconds. I like the concept but I wouldn't touch this thing with a ten foot pole unless everyone in the supply chain was PCI/SOC2/ISO 27001 certified, the whole supply chain has been vetted, and I have blood oaths about its security from third party analysts.

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

#127

Post by zahlman »

> And honestly, we feel like we're constantly fighting the browser we use every day. It's not one big thing, but a series of small, constant frustrations. I'll have 70+ tabs open from three different projects and completely lose my train of thought. And simple stuff like reordering tide pods from amazon or filling out forms shouldn't need our full attention anymore. AI can handle all of this, and that's exactly what we're building.

So your thesis is that an AI agent should decide what I pay attention to, rather than me?

What could possibly go wrong?

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

#128

Post by ajb »

I think there is big value in something that is on the side of the user, in particular in processing user-hostile material. Here are some concrete use cases:

* Buying a sofa. You want to filter for sofas of a specific size, with certain features, marketing sites want to feed you a bunch of marketing slop for each sofa before giving you the details . This generalises to many domains.

* You have a few friends who are still stuck on Facebook, you want to be notified if they post anything and avoid other rubbish

* The local neighborhood is stuck organising in a Facebook group or even worse, nextdoor. You want to see any new posts except for those couple of guys who are always posting the same thing.

* A government consultation website has been put up, but as a hurdle the consultation document has been combinatorially expanded to 763 pages by bureaucratic authoring techniques. You want to undo the combinatorial expansion do you can identify things you actually care about.

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

#129

Post by zahlman »

tolerance wrote: post #109
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My guess is that this is for impatient people; people who think that the prescribed use cases are somehow necessary for their "workflows"; people who subscribe to terms like "cognitive friction" within the context of these use cases; people who are...sort of lazy.

...Why do these lazy people put so much effort into coming up with fancy words to justify that laziness?

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

#130

Post by felarof »

kevinsync wrote: post #114

IMO comments so far seem to be not seeing the forest for the trees -- I can imagine incredible value for myself in a browser that hooks into a local LLM, writes everything it sees to a local timestamped database (oversimplification), parses and summarizes everything you interact with (again, oversimplification -- this would be tunable and scriptable), exposes Puppeteer-like functionality that is both scriptable via c…

Thank you so much for your honest feedback. I 100% agree - this is spot on! This is exactly the vision we had.

We spend 90%+ of our time in browsers, yet they're still basically dumb windows. Having an AI assistant that remembers what you visited, clips important articles (remember Evernote web clipper?), saves highlights and makes everything semantically searchable - all running locally - would be game-changing.

Everything stays in a local PostgresDB - your history, highlights, sessions. You can ask "what was that pricing comparison from last month?" or "find my highlights about browser automation" and it just works. Plus built-in self-control features to block distracting sites when you need to focus.

Beyond search and memory, the browser can actually help you work. AI that intelligently groups your tabs ("these 15 are all Chromium research"), automation for grunt work ("compare 2TB hard drive prices across these sites"), or even "summarize all new posts in my Discord servers" - all handled locally. The browser should help us manage internet chaos, not add to it.

Would love to hear what specific workflows are painful for you!

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