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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

#191
post #132

“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 :)

As an old Netscape user I like the name, but I agree it probably won't appeal to the vast majority. I would prefer Nextscape though cause Nxtscape is a bit too SV. Hate to bikeshed on you though

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

#192

My usecase is to extract CSV or other data files from websites pertaining to water. For example here is the historical reservoir level data in South Australia[1]. Extracting the data was a big pain (at least for me with minimal front end experience). If downloading this can be automated with agents, I'm definitely giving it a shot. [1] https://data.sa.gov.au/data/dataset/reservoir-volumes-2018

You don’t need AI for this. You can just write a script to pull the most up to date csv

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

#195
This is the wrong product. The right product is an AI-powered operating system that presents webviews.

Web browsers as applications are made completely useless by the AI wave and I fully expect only the webview portion to survive long run.

Microsoft, Apple, and Google are best positioned to capitalize on this. Meta is further behind but has decent glasses.

The pendulum is on its way back to native.

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

#196
post #190

Why not something like https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser . Its kinda built really well without exposing webdriver etc and can comfortably run js and communicate with LLMs.Has full agentic capabilites. Why a new browser instead of a robust extension?

Why a new browser extension for Chrome instead of an MCP operating Chrome over Chrome DevTools Protocol?

https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/

Not vouching for this project, but just an example of the category existing: https://github.com/AgentDeskAI/browser-tools-mcp

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

#197

Sounds like a pretty clear case of trademark infringement. Nxtscape is very confusingly similar to Netscape.

I only clicked because the name seemed very smart! INAL so I'm not sure about the infringement part, but I loved how they got this cool name by changing only one letter.

Bravo, to whom ever came up with the name.

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

#198
I got a chance to play with this a bit and while I see the promise it's still a far way off.

I asked it to find the best price for a new Seagate Exos 24TB drive on Amazon (GPT-4o):

> The best price found for a new Seagate EXOS 24TB enterprise hard drive on Amazon is $274.99 (model ST24000NM000C). This is a renewed/refurbished unit with 4.1/5 stars from 39 reviews. Note: The search results show mostly renewed units, and new units may be available at different prices on individual product pages.

Ok, fair, you couldn't find a new one on Amazon. I would have prefered a "Couldn't find one" instead of leading with the price and only in the second sentence mentioning it's a refurb. Note, this is mostly an LLM failing, not Nxtscape, that part seemed to work well overall.

I then followed up with "I only want a new drive, please look at other popular electronic retailers". It replied with (formatted slightly):

> Best Buy - WD Blue 2TB Internal Hard Drive ($59.99, on sale from $70)

> Newegg - Desktop Internal Hard Drives (500GB up to 8TB available) - Price range: $180-$299 - 4.5 store rating - Features: 30-day returns, 5-9 day delivery

> Amazon - Seagate EXOS Enterprise Hard Drives (up to 24TB)

> Additional options include SSDs from Newegg ($60-$201) if you're interested in faster storage solutions.

As almost always with LLMs, I see where it went off the beaten path. I didn't specify "a new one with the same specs I originally asked for", I shouldn't have to. This is probably mostly on the LLM, I don't know if Nxtscape could improve that with prompting (I don't know exactly what they are sending to judge either way). Also it got lazy with the Amazon response (no price).

One way that Nxtscape might be able to improve is to parse out what the user is asking for, creating a data structure to define a "result" (in my case: url, name, price, description?), use that to prompt the LLM to conform to that shape, then take the results and pass them all through a one-off LLM instance to summarize the data. I think that would help with the inconsistencies in the results. Then again, that's very "Data extraction"/"data lookup"-focused and I haven't even played with using it for input: Fill out this form, loop this process for input (mail merge), etc.

Really cool idea and I'll try throwing some other problems at it as I think of them, but mostly for fun/research, this doesn't seem like force-multiplier for my normal workflows (yet).

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

#199
post #21

I’m using Dia a lot for work at the moment and frankly it’s a gamechanger. granted I’m not a developer but being able to interact with an LLM that has access to the page I’m on is extremely useful: Instead of manually hunting across half a dozen different elements, then copy/paste and retype to put something into a format I want… I can just get Dia do it. In fact, I can create a shortcut to get it to do it the same w…

What is Dia (perhaps provide a link)? I'm aware of the diagramming tool, but that's clearly not what you mean here?

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

#200
post #190

Why not something like https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser . Its kinda built really well without exposing webdriver etc and can comfortably run js and communicate with LLMs.Has full agentic capabilites. Why a new browser instead of a robust extension?

Why a new browser extension for Chrome instead of an MCP operating Chrome over Chrome DevTools Protocol? https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/ Not vouching for this project, but just an example of the category existing: https://github.com/AgentDeskAI/browser-tools-mcp

CDP is great for testing. But one of the most basic checks for bot detection is checking for CDP(webdriver). Its always going to be a cat and mouse game. You'll see a bunch of solutions captch solvers etc, But they usually are only good for a few weeks.
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