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

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#121

Post by mdaniel » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 1:46 AM UTC

swyx wrote: post #116

mdaniel wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, I wasn't passing judgement upon their forking of Chrome; that's a business decision whether it gets them where they want to go. What I'm saying is that IF you're going to try that stunt, it's just like adopting one of those exotic animals: you need to understand what ongoing upkeep cost you're incurring, not just "oh, hey, I found a jaguar on the side of the road! here, kitty, kitty!"

It's also not a rando library that changes 3 times a year and who fucking cares if it has vulns: this is one of the biggest attack surfaces known to mankind given what it does for the user

Merely as a "for comparison," rebuilding Firefox takes about an hour on a developer class workstation, which IMHO sure would make tracking upstream a lot less expensive

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#122

Post by moneywaters » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 5:50 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #42

The 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…

Yeah it should have your preferences for things to do stuff based on your aesthetics but I see how it could become security nightmare

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#123

Post by avallark » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 6:49 AM UTC

Where is my linux version?

A lot of researchers who could really use this project would be sitting with a dual gpu setup on a linux machine. Would be an instant hit with the linux community.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#124

Post by xebulon » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 10:38 AM UTC

My main gripe - and I cannot sufficiently emphasise how fundamental this is - is that it seems, just as with Comet, this is not actually the integration of LLM agency into the browser. it's using LLMs to pretend to be humans doing things with a browser as a human would, using [a limited subset of] it's UI - the least powerful way to use the web, which is the source of the problem to begin with.

I set the same simple task as I set Comet: examine the code resposible for choosing language captions and displaying them with a view to enhance the functionality to display multiple language captions in parallel. This is a high-school exercise, except for how atrocious the HTML can be for any given media-player page.

BrowserOS, like Comet, pretends it isn't capable of actually working with the DOM. This is because bad - or, at best, unambitious - design choices have been made as to how the LLM interfaces with the browser.

I even made a local HTTP API for Comet to use the MacOS accessibility API (which ironically gives greater scriptable browser control) and it couldn't even make a background HTTP get request with AppleScript to localhost. I suspect BrowserOS will be similarly crippled, although at least I can in theory fix it, unlike with Perplexity's closed-source half-assed Chromium bundling.

Can we try a little bit harder, dream a little bigger, imagine how to train, tune and instruct language modes to realistically fight the complexity of web bloat and give the user full programmatic natural-language power to interface with digital services?

I don't believe it would take any more effort than has already been employed.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#125

Post by andy_ng » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 8:56 AM UTC

I love the vision of a privacy‑first, open‑source browser that runs AI agents locally, but shipping a custom Chromium fork is a huge maintenance lift so how will you handle timely CVE patches? And the demo video on your website is a bit too generic, can you show a more task-specific one?