Feels like yet another solution in search of a problem.
All the same, looks like y’all are having fun working on it, and maybe some unforeseen usecase will bubble up.
Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
161–170 of 228 posts
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#162On 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 po…
Thanks for raising this - it's a critical concern and you're absolutely right to be cautious. This is exactly why we're going local-first and open source. With cloud agents (like Manus.im), you're trusting a black box with your credentials. With local agents, you maintain control: - Agents only run when you explicitly trigger them - You see exactly what they're doing in real-time and can stop them - You can run tasks…
Have an agent monitor what is going on and raise dialogs explaining why something is not okay, question the need for something, have email or sms confirmation, extra passwords or bluntly refuse to do the destructive task right now (ask me again in 36 hours) Then, when you have the blood oath and the certifications, it can continue to monitor as an extra layer.
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#163This is quite cool! Very excited for this concept. Kudos to launching on HN!
some genuine feedback on a frustrating early experience:
- I ran the suggested "Group all my tabs by topic" in productivity agent mode. It worked great.
- I then asked it to remove all tab groups and reset things, but was told this:
This is a browser automation task. Please use **Agent Mode** for web interactions like clicking, filling forms, navigating sites, or extracting web content.
This is a productivity task. Please use **Chat Mode** for tab management, bookmarks, sessions, history, and content analysis.
Overall, it'd be nice if every browser level action it took had an undo button. Or at least if it was smart enough/able to remove the tab groups it just created.
Will keep playing with it more.
edit1: one more weird issue: While running the chat interface on chrome internal pages like chrome://extensions, it would randomly browse me to google.com for some reason.
edit2: confirmed that productivity mode lacks a tool to ungroup tabs, just a tool to create tab groups.
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#164> simple stuff like reordering tide pods from amazon [..] shouldn't need our full attention anymore There's a straw man here. If you want to reorder an item on Amazon: click on 'order history', scroll, and click buy. This is a well-optimized path already and it doesn't require your full attention. I suspect the agent approach takes more effort as you need to type and then monitor what the AI is doing.
Hmm, there are similar use-cases which I would much prefer to offload to AI rather than me spending time on it -- "compare prices of 2tb sandisk ssd hard drive across amazon, walmart and b&h"
That seems like a completely different thing, but I agree that would make a much better demo. Is that something nxtscape can do?
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#165Are we still tossing around the 10x productivity boost? Please make this stop. I see first commit on April 28 so by 10x productivity its like you've been working on this for almost 2.5 years, and there is still a waiting list on the website. Appreciate the agplv3 licence, kudos on that.
The 10x line made me lose all interest I had on this.
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#166This is quite cool! Very excited for this concept. Kudos to launching on HN! some genuine feedback on a frustrating early experience: - I ran the suggested "Group all my tabs by topic" in productivity agent mode. It worked great. - I then asked it to remove all tab groups and reset things, but was told this: This is a browser automation task. Please use **Agent Mode** for web interactions like clicking, filling forms…
Thank you so much for this feedback! And sorry for the annoying experience. I'll debug and fix it. this still early beta version :(
We have this agent mode and chat mode both with separate tools. I think the "prompt" today is not good enough, will see if there is a better way to address it.
Regarding un-grouping, that API is currently missing in chrome. I'm currently looking to add this support.
Hmm couple of people have asked for "undo" now. will see how we can implement this. I imagine something like cursor's "restore checkpoint" would be neat.
Quick question, do you think these productivity features are critical in your day to day workflow? Any specific examples you can share? :)
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#167“nxtscape” gives the good old "SCSI" vibes. People just nailed “GPT”. Please consider something you can say in one breath. Great product though.
Haha thanks. Based on today's feedback, I guess we need to spend little more time on our naming and branding. will think about it :)
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a big red button to always stop the agent.
you will run into the same problems the extension approaches have (Like nanobrowser etc). Which is if i have to supervise constantly for non reversible actions, then im no more efficient(actually less i would argue) than just doing the task myself. A human in the loop- pause just before a non reversible action asking for approval maybe? And the user can see all the current things that need approval. But a stop button…
Yeah good point. if there was a "popup" or some "notification" at OS level which asked for approval for certain actions, would that be helpful? Also, maybe we can allow users the flexibility with regards to how much automation they are comfortable with.
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not today. But wonder if it matter if it the agent is mostly using it for "human" use cases and not scrapping?
Yes it would matter. The AI might be I in your eyes, but it is still A.
I'll poke the bear:
As a user, the browser is my agent. If I'm directing an LLM to do something on a page in my browser, it's not that much different than me clicking a button manually, or someone using a screen reader to read the text on a page. The browser is my user agent and the specific tools I choose to use in my browser shouldn't be forbidden by a webpage. (that's why to this day all browsers still claim to be Mozilla...)
(This is very different than mass scraping web pages for training purposes. Those should absolutely respect robots.txt. There's a big difference between a user operated agentic-browser interacting with a web page and mass link crawling.)
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#170This is quite cool! Very excited for this concept. Kudos to launching on HN! some genuine feedback on a frustrating early experience: - I ran the suggested "Group all my tabs by topic" in productivity agent mode. It worked great. - I then asked it to remove all tab groups and reset things, but was told this: This is a browser automation task. Please use **Agent Mode** for web interactions like clicking, filling forms…
Thank you so much for this feedback! And sorry for the annoying experience. I'll debug and fix it. this still early beta version :( We have this agent mode and chat mode both with separate tools. I think the "prompt" today is not good enough, will see if there is a better way to address it. Regarding un-grouping, that API is currently missing in chrome. I'm currently looking to add this support. Hmm couple of people…
> Quick question, do you think these productivity features are critical in your day to day workflow? Any specific examples you can share? :)
hah, absolutely not! That specific nit was pretty low priority... I definitely don't imagine I'll be asking it to ungroup tabs regularly, or if ever. But the loop of it being stuck between Chat and Agent mode seems like more generic, and might happen whenever there's a prompt neither agent can handle. Ideally it would have just said "I can't ungroup tabs".
Restoring to a checkpoint could be nice, but might not be worth it in the early stage if its high effort for you. I've yet to do anything actually useful/productivity focused with Nxtscape yet, but will keep exploring.