Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

browseros.com

31–40 of 125 posts

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#31
post #30
post #27

What is the default BrowserOS model? Is it local, and if so, what inferencing server are you using?

The default model is Gemini. You can bring your own API keys and change the default to any model you local. Or better run model locally using Ollama and use that!

The default is a remote Gemini call?

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#32
> --- How we built? We patch Chromium's C++ source code with our changes, so we have the same security as Google Chrome. We also have an auto-updater for security patches and regular updates.

So you rebuild your browser on every Chromium release? Because that's the risk: often changes go into Chromium with very innocent looking commit messages than are released from embargo 90 days later in their CVE reference

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#33
post #32

> --- How we built? We patch Chromium's C++ source code with our changes, so we have the same security as Google Chrome. We also have an auto-updater for security patches and regular updates. So you rebuild your browser on every Chromium release? Because that's the risk: often changes go into Chromium with very innocent looking commit messages than are released from embargo 90 days later in their CVE reference

Good question, so far we have been building on top of chromium release that Google Chrome is based on.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#34
post #7

I would prefer this as a browser extension, not as its own browser application.

We had this exact thought as well, you don't need a whole browser to implement the agentic capabilities, you can implement the whole thing with the limited permissions of a browser extension.

There are plenty of zero day exploit patches that Google immediately rolls out and not to mention all the other features that Google doesn't push to Chromium. I wouldn't trust a random open source project for my day-to-day browser.

Check out rtrvr.ai for a working implementation, we are an AI Web Agent browser extension that meets you where your workflows already are.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#35
post #12
post #7

I would prefer this as a browser extension, not as its own browser application.

We would've preferred to build this as browser extension too. But we strongly believe that for building a good agent co-pilot we need bunch of changes at Chromium C++ code level. For example, chromium has a accessibility tree for every website, but doesn't expose it as an API to chrome extension. Having access to accessibility tree would greatly improve agent execution. We are also building bunch of changes in C++ fo…

I mean you could build the agent with a first principles understanding of the DOM instead of just hacking together with the accessibility tree

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#40
post #29

Would love to see this show up on homebrew!

Oooh, that's a nice idea! We'll look into doing that!

Making a homebrew recipe is super easy, and you can definitely find an example to draw from that's "shaped" like your app. Highly recommend.
Post reply on HN