Congrats! How are you planning to make the project sustainable (from a financial, and dev work/maintenance pov)?
my guess is it's just an electron app or chromium wrapper with an ollama wrapper to talk to it (there are plenty of free open source libs to control browsers).
Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
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Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
#42I think it'd be better to show more non-trivial examples where the time savings is clear, and the failure cases are minimized... or even better how it's going to recover from those failure cases. Do I get a bespoke UI for the specific problem? Talk to it via chat?
This whole world is non-trivial. Good luck!
Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would this be possible for Firefox?
IIRC, Firefox's web extension API does not provide access to accessibility tree as well.
Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
#44So would this or any AI browser go out and fetch a list of the best deals for my trip to Iceland? After Show me all the options it has found for flights, hotels, car rentals and show cheapest/best prices with all details (fly out of and into with times) to even allow me to pay for each item on same page I asked it to do so? As well it could group the overall best deal with details and then i can just click to pay ins…
Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
#45The demo buying toothpaste shows the difficulty of these tasks. Toothpaste itself was very underspecified, and it essentially randomly chose from a huge list. Some tasks may have past actions that could help guide, others won't have any to inform. Failure cases abound -- maybe the toothpaste you previously bought is no longer available. Then what? Ultimately how much time did this particular example save since you ne…
We are also just getting started and trying to narrow down on a high-value niche use-case.
There are few repetitive, boring use-cases where time saving could be meaningful -- one example: Walmart 3rd-party sellers routinely (multiple times a day) keep checking prices of the competitor products to price their products appropriately. This could be easily automated with current agentic browsers.
Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
We are working on smaller, fine-tuned model too, which will be the default soon! It should be much faster and precise at navigation tasks.
Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
#47The demo buying toothpaste shows the difficulty of these tasks. Toothpaste itself was very underspecified, and it essentially randomly chose from a huge list. Some tasks may have past actions that could help guide, others won't have any to inform. Failure cases abound -- maybe the toothpaste you previously bought is no longer available. Then what? Ultimately how much time did this particular example save since you ne…
Great points! For sure, the whole agentic browsers space is still super early. We are also just getting started and trying to narrow down on a high-value niche use-case. There are few repetitive, boring use-cases where time saving could be meaningful -- one example: Walmart 3rd-party sellers routinely (multiple times a day) keep checking prices of the competitor products to price their products appropriately. This co…
Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
#48I 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 brows…
Chrome extensions is not a bad idea too. Just saying that owning the underlying source code has some strong advantages in the long term (being able to use C++ for a11y tree, DOM handling, etc -- which will be 20-40X faster than injecting JS using chrome extension).
Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great points! For sure, the whole agentic browsers space is still super early. We are also just getting started and trying to narrow down on a high-value niche use-case. There are few repetitive, boring use-cases where time saving could be meaningful -- one example: Walmart 3rd-party sellers routinely (multiple times a day) keep checking prices of the competitor products to price their products appropriately. This co…
But in reality, would much more consistently be automated by a single playwright script.
But for non-technical folks, agentic browsers seems like a good UX to build such and many more automations.
Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
#50Is BrowserOS-OS on the roadmap? (Will you ever make a better FydeOS, or if you're laser-focused, perhaps be open to sharing some with them, so they could?)
I'll check out FydeOS!