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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

#201

Post by Tsarp »

Tsarp wrote: post #200
yencabulator wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With stuff like https://www.cloudflare.com/en-in/application-services/produc... and https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/ big money going on both sides last thing you want is to shadow detected as a bot. Its all ok if you are scraping to top rated SEO slop which is usually static sites but for anything beyond it wont work well eventually. Quite a few issues on browerbase, crawl4ai and similar repos around being detected as a bot.

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

#202

Post by yencabulator »

Tsarp wrote: post #200
yencabulator wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no reason why the same cat and mouse game wouldn't apply to this browser as a whole.

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

#203

Post by ppqqrr »

Chromium, Electron and VSCode are all the rage to fork as an LLM application base. In truth it doesn't really matter which you start from, they all lead to the One Local LLM App. There's already a fairly deterministic path of development, we're just waiting to see who wins the race in execution and marketing.

In the meantime, the bigger opportunity with relatively little competition at the moment is the Web itself, not which application to browse it with. The Web absolutely sucks, and that's most of the reason we even feel the need for an "elevated browser experience" in the first place (i.e. lifted trucks on the information highway).

The Web sucks, because it was built naively, then optimized for profitable friction. But all of it stood on the assumption that the cost of production on the web involves highly skilled human labor. LLMs have shattered that assumption, but the effects have not manifested. Which is to say that the entire existing Web is probably going to become a marginal, legacy corner of a much bigger base of LLM-driven hypermedia contents that is yet to come.

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

#204

Post by bosky101 »

As a consumer I'm asking myself why not just make an extension. I can see myself trying and picking 2 or more browser addons to to turbo charge + chat with any page.

From a founder hat, I can see why the code base is a moat, hard problem. I hope the effort is worth the cost.

Good luck.

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

#205

Post by felarof »

bosky101 wrote: post #204

As a consumer I'm asking myself why not just make an extension. I can see myself trying and picking 2 or more browser addons to to turbo charge + chat with any page. From a founder hat, I can see why the code base is a moat, hard problem. I hope the effort is worth the cost. Good luck.

Thank you for your support!

Yes, in the long run, owning the underlying codebase would allow us to have more control and provide better user experience. (Very similar to cursor forking vscode)

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

#206

Post by xnx »

felarof wrote: post #68
wild_egg wrote: post #59

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.

> Few ideas we were thinking of: integrating a small LLM

Chrome has a built-in LLM: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in

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

#208

Post by faxmeyourcode »

pickpuck wrote: post #87
felarof wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been trying (albeit not very hard) to build an accessibility library and toolset that can be exposed via mcp server. I think it has the potential to be much more ergonomic for generalized computer-use agents than stuff like playwright or the classic screenshot approach. Low latency computer use is another thing that I'd like to solve.

The issue is mac and windows accessibility APIs are opaque and I have no idea what I'm doing so I'm forced to vibe code it all which is not turning out too well... :-)

I suffer from mild carpal tunnel so I want to build a really low latency computer use agent that can do anything on my computer without me having to learn the talon voice syntax or some other traditional accessibility software like mac dictation.

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

#209

Post by faxmeyourcode »

b0ner_t0ner wrote: post #172
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?"

Why should I use a calculator when I can use an abacus?

Why use an abacus when I can just use my fingers and toes?

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

#210

Post by ivape »

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…

Everything you said sounds great, other than the fact the first half of it is generic surveillance dystopia. I had hoped we’d be a more unique dystopia, but it appears we’ll have to settle for run of the mill.

How it all started:

“Bookmarks and shit don’t cut it anymore”.

Tsk tsk.

I’ll just leave this here:

https://youtu.be/kGYwdVt3rhI

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