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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

#221
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but its orders of magnitude lesser when webdriver flag is an extremely basic bot check that is now considered 101.

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

#222

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…

This is basically what Microsoft wants to do with Recall and they got slammed for it. Which drives me nuts because it's the only feature from the recent AI hype wave that excites me because it's the only thing so far that sounds like it will actually make my life better. But then I thought about it a bit more and I realized that what I really want is not AI, I just want my computer to have a detailed local history an…

There's the whole privacy issue. We know every software company exfiltrates as much data as they can get away with, and we know the US government has access to all that data. If Recall is good, then ICE conc-camping individuals based on their search history is good, because that's what Recall will do.

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

#223
post #174

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…

For a long time I kicked around the idea of a browser extension that archives the full text of any long webpages you spend more than 30 seconds on, for full text indexing and search. This would be that, but even better.

https://github.com/iansinnott/full-text-tabs-forever

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

#224
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

True, but its orders of magnitude lesser when webdriver flag is an extremely basic bot check that is now considered 101.

It sounds like you're thinking of window.navigator.webdriver, which is a WebDriver thing not part of Chrome DevTools Protocol. With CDP, as far as I can tell the detection mechanisms are more about the heuristics of e.g. how fast a form is filled -- which this AI stuff will trigger immediately too.

(And even if CDP had an explicit marker somewhere, surely patching that out is easier than piling up enough patches to "make a new browser".)

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

#225
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but its orders of magnitude lesser when webdriver flag is an extremely basic bot check that is now considered 101.

It sounds like you're thinking of window.navigator.webdriver, which is a WebDriver thing not part of Chrome DevTools Protocol. With CDP, as far as I can tell the detection mechanisms are more about the heuristics of e.g. how fast a form is filled -- which this AI stuff will trigger immediately too. (And even if CDP had an explicit marker somewhere, surely patching that out is easier than piling up enough patches to "…

Dont you need to navigator.webdriver === true for CDP to drive automation? Maybe I need to update my understanding on this. THis is usually a dead giveaway

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

#227
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're thinking of window.navigator.webdriver, which is a WebDriver thing not part of Chrome DevTools Protocol. With CDP, as far as I can tell the detection mechanisms are more about the heuristics of e.g. how fast a form is filled -- which this AI stuff will trigger immediately too. (And even if CDP had an explicit marker somewhere, surely patching that out is easier than piling up enough patches to "…

Dont you need to navigator.webdriver === true for CDP to drive automation? Maybe I need to update my understanding on this. THis is usually a dead giveaway

I see mentions that (unpatched) webdriver is easy to detect but detecting CDP only works by heuristics on timing etc.

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

#228
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time I kicked around the idea of a browser extension that archives the full text of any long webpages you spend more than 30 seconds on, for full text indexing and search. This would be that, but even better.

https://github.com/iansinnott/full-text-tabs-forever

Oh wow, this is exactly what I want, but with a server component so it works on mobile too (where I do most of my reading) and gets data from all of my workstations (I have 4-6 at any given time).

Maybe I can hack it into this one.

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