Is this only for MacOS? If it's a Chromium fork, what's the reason for no Linux/Windows? Also what's the business model?
> Also what's the business model?
The hype cycle business model never changes.
Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
141–150 of 228 posts
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#142On the one hand: an agentic browser sounds like a cool idea. Being able to automate things with an agent on the client side is crazy powerful. On the other hand: this has the potential to be an absolute security Chernobyl. A browser is likely to be logged into all your sensitive accounts. An agent in your browser is probably going to be exposed to untrusted inputs from the internet by its very nature. You have the po…
Thanks for raising this - it's a critical concern and you're absolutely right to be cautious.
This is exactly why we're going local-first and open source. With cloud agents (like Manus.im), you're trusting a black box with your credentials. With local agents, you maintain control:
- Agents only run when you explicitly trigger them
- You see exactly what they're doing in real-time and can stop them
- You can run tasks in separate chrome user profile
- Most importantly: the code is open source, so you can audit exactly what's happening.
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah no, nothing of that helps you bypass the ads on their website*, but scraping and summarizing does, so its wildly different for monetization purposes, and in most cases that means the maintainability and survival of any given website. I know its not completely true, I know reader mode can help you bypass the ads _after_ you already had a peek at the cluttered version, but if you need to go to the next page or som…
> I know its not completely true, I know read-mode can help you bypass the ads _after_ you already had a peek at the cluttered version What about reader mode that is auto-configured to turn on immediately on landing on specific domains? Is that a robot for the purposes of robots.txt? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea... And also, just to confirm, I'm to understand that if I'm navigating the…
If you are using an ad-blocker by definition you are intentionally breaking the intended behavior by the creator of any given website (for personal gain), in that context any discussion about robots.txt or any other behavior that the creator expects is a moot point.
Autoconfig of reader mode and so on its so uncommon that is not even in the radar of most websites, if it was browser developers probably would try to create a solution that satisfies both parties, like putting the ads at the end and required to be text-only and other guidelines, but its not popular, same thing happens with terminal-based browsers, a lot of the most visited websites in the world don't even work without JS enabled.
On the other hand, this AI stuff seems to envision a larger userbase so it could become a concern and therefore the role of robots.txt or other anti-bot features could have some practical connotations.
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#144This is definitely a winners take all market. Kudos for giving it a shot, but imo browser projects are just too big for a team of 2/3. Plus, google has already demoed at IO the first hint at this. IMO you just cannot move fast enough to grab enough market share as a first/second mover before google just does it on chrome, and that's assuming you can outcompete with Dia in the first place. Even browser-use can do this…
Thanks for the honest feedback! Definitely agree there is good amount of competition here. But we do think there is a gap in the market for open-source, community driven and privacy-first AI browser. (Something like Brave?)
remember, gaps in the market sometimes exist for a reason. Forget AI. How many open source, community driven and privacy first browsers have made serious money?
Brave is a decent example but their business model is actually complicated, it includes a lot of little stuff. And they dont have the unit cost of LLMs (im assuming at some point you will take the burden of the llms, if not local)
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not today. But wonder if it matter if it the agent is mostly using it for "human" use cases and not scrapping?
There's no reason not to respect it. If your browser behaves, it's not going to be excluded in robots.txt. If your browser doesn't behave, you should at least respect robots.txt. If your browser doesn't behave, and you continue to ignore robots.txt, that's just... shitty.
> If your browser behaves, it's not going to be excluded in robots.txt.
No, it's common practice to allow Googlebot and deny all other crawlers by default [0].
This is within their rights when it comes to true scrapers, but it's part of why I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of applying robots.txt to what are clearly user agents. It sets a precedent where it's not inconceivable that we have websites curating allowlists of user agents like they already do for scrapers, which would be very bad for the web.
[0] As just one example: https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha...
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> only reading the content the user would otherwise have gone through. Why? My user agent is configured to make things easier for me and allow me to access content that I wouldn't otherwise choose to access. Dark mode allows me to read late at night. Reader mode allows me to read content that would otherwise be unbearably cluttered. I can zoom in on small text to better see it. Should my reader mode or dark mode or z…
Yeah no, nothing of that helps you bypass the ads on their website*, but scraping and summarizing does, so its wildly different for monetization purposes, and in most cases that means the maintainability and survival of any given website. I know its not completely true, I know reader mode can help you bypass the ads _after_ you already had a peek at the cluttered version, but if you need to go to the next page or som…
robots.txt is not there to protect your ad-based business model. It's meant for automated scrapers that recursively retrieve all pages on your website, which this browser is not doing at all. What a user does with a page after it has entered their browser is their own prerogative.
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know its not completely true, I know read-mode can help you bypass the ads _after_ you already had a peek at the cluttered version What about reader mode that is auto-configured to turn on immediately on landing on specific domains? Is that a robot for the purposes of robots.txt? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea... And also, just to confirm, I'm to understand that if I'm navigating the…
If you are using an ad-blocker by definition you are intentionally breaking the intended behavior by the creator of any given website (for personal gain), in that context any discussion about robots.txt or any other behavior that the creator expects is a moot point. Autoconfig of reader mode and so on its so uncommon that is not even in the radar of most websites, if it was browser developers probably would try to cr…
> If you are using an ad-blocker by definition you are intentionally breaking the intended behavior by the creator of any given website (for personal gain), in that context any discussion about robots.txt or any other behavior that the creator expects is a moot point.
I'm not asking if you believe ad blocking is ethical, I got that you don't. I'm asking if it turns my browser into a scraper that should be treated as such, which is an orthogonal question to the ethics of the tool in the first place.
I strongly disagree that user agents of the sort shown in the demo should count as robots. Robots.txt is designed for bots that produce tons of traffic to discourage them from hitting expensive endpoints (or to politely ask them to not scrape at all). I've responded to incidents caused by scraper traffic and this tool will never produce traffic in the same order of magnitude as a problematic scraper.
If we count this as a robot for the purposes of robots.txt we're heading down a path that will end the user agent freedom we've hitherto enjoyed. I cannot endorse that path.
For me the line is simple, and it's the one defined by robotstxt.org [0]: "A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced. ... Normal Web browsers are not robots, because they are operated by a human, and don't automatically retrieve referenced documents (other than inline images)."
If the user agent is acting on my instructions and accessing a specific and limited subset of the site that I asked it to, it's not a web scraper and should not be treated as such. The defining feature of a robot is amount of traffic produced, not what my user agent does with the information it pulls.
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah no, nothing of that helps you bypass the ads on their website*, but scraping and summarizing does, so its wildly different for monetization purposes, and in most cases that means the maintainability and survival of any given website. I know its not completely true, I know reader mode can help you bypass the ads _after_ you already had a peek at the cluttered version, but if you need to go to the next page or som…
robots.txt is not there to protect your ad-based business model. It's meant for automated scrapers that recursively retrieve all pages on your website, which this browser is not doing at all. What a user does with a page after it has entered their browser is their own prerogative.
>It's meant for automated scrapers that recursively retrieve all pages on your website, _which this browser is not doing at all_
AFAIK this is false, and this browser can do things like "summarize all the cooking recipes linked in this page" and therefore act exactly like a scraper (even if at smaller scale than most scrapers)
If tomorrow magically all phones and all computers had an ad-blocking browser installed -and set as the default browser- a big chunk of the economy would collapse, so while I can see the philosophical value of "What a user does with a page after it has entered their browser is their own prerogative", the pragmatic in me knows that if all users cared about that and enforced it it would have grave repercussions in the livelihood of many.
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#149On the one hand: an agentic browser sounds like a cool idea. Being able to automate things with an agent on the client side is crazy powerful. On the other hand: this has the potential to be an absolute security Chernobyl. A browser is likely to be logged into all your sensitive accounts. An agent in your browser is probably going to be exposed to untrusted inputs from the internet by its very nature. You have the po…
Thanks for raising this - it's a critical concern and you're absolutely right to be cautious. This is exactly why we're going local-first and open source. With cloud agents (like Manus.im), you're trusting a black box with your credentials. With local agents, you maintain control: - Agents only run when you explicitly trigger them - You see exactly what they're doing in real-time and can stop them - You can run tasks…
this sounds LLM generated
regardless, you did not answer OPs point, which is that any potentially malicious site can prompt inject you at any point, and trigger an MCP or any other action or whatever before you see them and stop them. The whole point of an AI browser is like self-driving car, being able to de-focus and let it do its thing. If i have to be nervous to watch if im getting hacked at any given second, then it's probably not a great product
Re: Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
robots.txt is not there to protect your ad-based business model. It's meant for automated scrapers that recursively retrieve all pages on your website, which this browser is not doing at all. What a user does with a page after it has entered their browser is their own prerogative.
>It's meant for automated scrapers that recursively retrieve all pages on your website, _which this browser is not doing at all_ AFAIK this is false, and this browser can do things like "summarize all the cooking recipes linked in this page" and therefore act exactly like a scraper (even if at smaller scale than most scrapers) If tomorrow magically all phones and all computers had an ad-blocking browser installed -an…
https://www.robotstxt.org/faq/what.html
> A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced.
There's nothing recursive about "summarize all the cooking recipes linked on this page". That's a single-level iterative loop.
I will grant that I should alter my original statement: if OP wanted to respect robots.txt when it receives a request that should be interpreted as an instruction to recursively fetch pages, then I'd think that's an appropriate use of robots.txt, because that's not materially different than implementing a web crawler by hand in code.
But that represents a tiny subset of the queries that will go through a tool like this and respecting robots.txt for non-recursive requests would lead to silly outcomes like the browser refusing to load reddit.com [0].