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Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

browseros.com

21–30 of 125 posts

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#21
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…

Would this be possible for Firefox?

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#22
So 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 instantly and or make some edits.

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#23

So 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…

We just started cooking, very soon you should be able to do this!

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#24
post #14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you upstream that change in order to make it an extension in the future? I think people would not value it any less.

We don't mind upstreaming. But I don't think Google Chrome/Chromium wants to expose it as an API chrome extensions, if not they would've done this long time ago. From Google's perspective, extension are meant to be lightweight applications, with restricted access.

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 unfortunately it seems like a single developer project and I could never get any of the examples to run.

https://sciter.com/

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't mind upstreaming. But I don't think Google Chrome/Chromium wants to expose it as an API chrome extensions, if not they would've done this long time ago. From Google's perspective, extension are meant to be lightweight applications, with restricted access.

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…

Yes, we want to do this too! We'll expose much more richer APIs.

What use-cases do you have in mind? like scraping?

Re: Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

#26
post #21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

#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!

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