Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#111

Post by felarof » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 8:56 PM UTC

dockercompost wrote: post #110

I didn't realize you all had changed your name and I'd already installed Nxtscape and thought something was wrong when I opened up BrowserOS and saw the same UI and fox emoji icon in the chat. btw I'm not gonna lie, I liked your old name better. I'm guessing you changed it for legal reasons? I tested it out asking it to summarize the comments of an Arstechnica article and at first it said: > I am unable to summarize…

Yeah, decided to change the name to avoid any troubles. Also, previous name was hard to pronounce :)

Thank you for the feedback. Would love to chat more on discord (https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr) and help you with your use-cases! we are shipping daily and improving things fast, agent should get much better in a few days.

> There's a Chrome extension that lets you use your iCloud passwords in Chrome and it doesn't work

Will check it out! We definitely want to make onboarding and password mgmt much easier!

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#112

Post by mdaniel » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 1:09 AM UTC

felarof wrote: post #98

Daedren wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromium will remove the Manifest V2 APIs, and none of these forks want to maintain them. Brave also chose to have their own built-in adblocker. The real question is, why not opt to fork Firefox who is doing that work for them.

+1, enabling uBlock origin could be a short term solution. But we are working on adding built-in adblockers just like Brave + enhancing it to detect more ad formats using lightweight local LLM.

> enhancing it to detect more ad formats using lightweight local LLM.

So you're going to boot up my_llm.prompt("is this request an ad? %s" % request.copy_as_curl()) for every XHR on the page?!

I know this comment is on a page about an AI web browser, but let's turn down the "LLMs cure all problems" a notch

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#113

Post by mdaniel » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 1:12 AM UTC

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #84

jazzyjackson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really interested in AI agents for my webbrowser, but it would be pretty cool to see a fork of chromium available that, aside from being de-googled, relaxes all the "restricted access" to make it more fun to modify and customize the way you guys are. Just a thought, may be more of a market for the framework more than the product :) See Sciter. A very cool, super lightweight alternative to Electron, but unfort…

I always wonder about what sort of js engine such projects use since at the end of the day imo, it is all just a dance b/w js engine, html and css. Html & Css feels a little solved problem but the problem is of the js engine. Sciter uses quickjs and I just checked and its like 35-36x times slower than V8 JIT Also another interesting rabbit hole is that I found Duktape in the quickjs benchmarks and I saw https://blogc…

> We really need some better way of preserving open source stuff I guess

Not some rando's blog engine in C++, or other kinds of stupid throw-away code

Anyway https://web.archive.org/web/20241122030659/https://github.co...> -> $(fossil clone https://code.rosaelefanten.org/blogcpp) which takes a stunning amount of time but then reports

    Round-trips: 15   Artifacts sent: 0  received: 2751
    Clone done, wire bytes sent: 4127  received: 124543126  remote: 2a03:4000:34:5e::1
    Rebuilding repository meta-data...
      100.0% complete...
    Extra delta compression... none found
    Vacuuming the database...
    project-id: 40a055cb170ae83c46b4ed9bf3b6a60e6e541aa0
    server-id:  cee9059305219c887fd29c677cbafb372252518a
    admin-user: mdaniel (password is "x2hEAaXUDj")
    opening the new ./blogcpp.fossil repository in directory ./blogcpp...
    3rdparty/ConfigParser/ConfigParser.cpp
    ...
    project-name: BlogC++
    repository:   /home/runner/blogcpp.fossil
    project-code: 40a055cb170ae83c46b4ed9bf3b6a60e6e541aa0
    checkout:     fbea390316bc3aace7de0a9ccdba90ecc1949a10 2024-12-17 22:03:16 UTC
    parent:       9e604d205e7922ef1af87952fe1bebef0cbac336 2022-01-15 02:22:33 UTC
    tags:         trunk
    comment:      fuck you github (user: Cthulhux)
    check-ins:    20

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#114

Post by jazzyjackson » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:03 AM UTC

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #84

jazzyjackson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really interested in AI agents for my webbrowser, but it would be pretty cool to see a fork of chromium available that, aside from being de-googled, relaxes all the "restricted access" to make it more fun to modify and customize the way you guys are. Just a thought, may be more of a market for the framework more than the product :) See Sciter. A very cool, super lightweight alternative to Electron, but unfort…

I always wonder about what sort of js engine such projects use since at the end of the day imo, it is all just a dance b/w js engine, html and css. Html & Css feels a little solved problem but the problem is of the js engine. Sciter uses quickjs and I just checked and its like 35-36x times slower than V8 JIT Also another interesting rabbit hole is that I found Duktape in the quickjs benchmarks and I saw https://blogc…

good callout wrt being slower than JIT. ofc for certain applications it's not a showstopper, ie, if you're not using javascript for your MVC but doing more of a progressive enhancement thing.

CSS2 is closer to trivial, but CSS3 is practically a 3D game engine with all of its matrix transforms, transitions, animations, variables - not to mention all the different layout schemes (Sciter blogged about introducing display:flex and display:grid two months ago)

The most interesting part of Sciter to me is that data persistence goes way beyond localStorage (string key: string value) or filesystem API, instead it's DyBase [0][1] behind the scenes, which looks to be a very intriguing style of storing trees of data in the host language's datatype (including whatever classes you define) without mucking about with the leaky abstractions of an ORM.

[0] https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/docs/md/s...

[1] http://www.garret.ru/dybase.html

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#115

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 4:15 AM UTC

anto_pp wrote: post #106

[flagged]

A word of advice, you're a new account and all your comments are about your service, that is why they are marked "dead," ie users will not see them, it's an anti spam measure. Spend more time actually engaging with the community rather than treating HN like a marketing channel and they won't be dead in the future.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#116

Post by swyx » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

mdaniel wrote: post #62

felarof wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I feel as though you overlooked the "every" word in my question. I appreciate you built once, that's a solid accomplishment. If I'm going to be riding your custom build, with your custom C++ changes that introduce their own RCE risk, I want to at least know I'm only vulnerable to your RCE and not your RCE plus the 'just disclosed' RCE for Chromium itself that was actually patched 3 weeks ago but that you didn't bothe…

i think you raise a good point but also... how else would you propose to "fork Chrome"? this seems like the most reasonable approach?

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#117

Post by lowwave » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 11:43 AM UTC

darkmuck wrote: post #38

This is similar to the chrome extension nanobrowser. https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser

From a quick scan of the page, they seems to use some kind external LLM API keys. The appear of the poster project seems to be locally run LLM (assuming tranfomer.js ).

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#118

Post by oezi » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

Mh, doesn't look like Microsoft has seen this enough:

Windows protected your PC Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app from starting. Running this app might put your PC at risk.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#119

Post by braebo » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 6:42 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #95

MasterYoda wrote: post #92

If this is a privacy first browser, why wasn´t Firefox used when it is much better out of the box for this approach? All security and privacy focused webbrowser use Firefox. Like Tor Browser, Mullvad Browser, LibreWolf etc. Also, I think it is super important we have different "webbrowser engines" and that are independent from big tech companies. If we only have chromium it would be really bad and hurt use consumer r…

I had exactly the same question. You're privacy focused but use chrome as the engine?

Brave is one of the best privacy-first browsers around… more secure than Firefox, and it’s a chromium fork.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#120

Post by ertok » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

I use OpenAI deep research feature a ton, what's cool about this is being able to see it do the research live vs. being told just hte steps in text format (I always have to go deeper and copy/paste the sources to verify

a) they are real and b) they are credible.

Excited to use this