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Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

(github.com)
313 points felarof | 7 comments | 20 Jun 25 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 1.258s | source | bottom

Hi HN - we're Nithin and Nikhil, twin brothers and founders of nxtscape.ai (YC S24). We're building Nxtscape ("next-scape") - an open-source, agentic browser for the AI era.

-- Why bother building a new browser? For the first time since Netscape was released in 1994, it feels like we can reimagine browsers from scratch for the age of AI agents. The web browser of tomorrow might not look like what we have today.

We saw how tools like Cursor gave developers a 10x productivity boost, yet the browser—where everyone else spends their entire workday—hasn't fundamentally changed.

And honestly, we feel like we're constantly fighting the browser we use every day. It's not one big thing, but a series of small, constant frustrations. I'll have 70+ tabs open from three different projects and completely lose my train of thought. And simple stuff like reordering tide pods from amazon or filling out forms shouldn't need our full attention anymore. AI can handle all of this, and that's exactly what we're building.

Here’s a demo of our early version https://dub.sh/nxtscape-demo

-- What makes us different We know others are exploring this space (Perplexity, Dia), but we want to build something open-source and community-driven. We're not a search or ads company, so we can focus on being privacy-first – Ollama integration, BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys), ad-blocker.

Btw we love what Brave started and stood for, but they've now spread themselves too thin across crypto, search, etc. We are laser-focused on one thing: making browsers work for YOU with AI. And unlike Arc (which we loved too but got abandoned), we're 100% open source. Fork us if you don't like our direction.

-- Our journey hacking a new browser To build this, we had to fork Chromium. Honestly, it feels like the only viable path today—we've seen others like Brave (started with electron) and Microsoft Edge learn this the hard way.

We also started with why not just build an extension. But realized we needed more control. Similar to the reason why Cursor forked VSCode. For example, Chrome has this thing called the Accessibility Tree - basically a cleaner, semantic version of the DOM that screen readers use. Perfect for AI agents to understand pages, but you can't use it through extension APIs.

That said, working with the 15M-line C++ chromium codebase has been an adventure. We've both worked on infra at Google and Meta, but Chromium is a different beast. Tools like Cursor's indexing completely break at this scale, so we've had to get really good with grep and vim. And the build times are brutal—even with our maxed-out M4 Max MacBook, a full build takes about 3 hours.

Full disclosure: we are still very early, but we have a working prototype on GitHub. It includes an early version of a "local Manus" style agent that can automate simple web tasks, plus an AI sidebar for questions, and other productivity features (grouping tabs, saving/resuming sessions, etc.).

Looking forward to any and all comments!

You can download the browser from our github page: https://github.com/nxtscape/nxtscape

1. dvt ◴[20 Jun 25 20:42 UTC] No.44331896[source]▶
Suffers from the same problem as all other AI "workflows"--no one wants to fucking chat with a computer (Brave sort-of does this, and it's god-awful). A chat interface should only be used as a fallback if the agent is too dumb to figure out what I want.

A chat interface works for ChatGPT because most folks use it as a pseudo-search, but productivity tools are (broadly speaking) not generative, therefore shouldn't be using freeform inputs. I have many thoughts on fixing this, and it's a very hard problem, but simply slapping an LLM onto Chrome is just lazy. I don't mean to be overly negative, but it's kind of wild to see YC funding slop like this.

And that's exactly what this is: slop. There's no technical creativity here, this isn't a new product segment, it barely deserves the "hey bro, this might be a feature, not a product" startup 101 criticism. It's what ChatGPT would spit out if you asked it what a good startup idea would be in 2025. All we need to do, even if we were being as charitable as possible, is ask who's doing the heavy lifting here (hint: it's not in the Github repo).

replies(3): >>44332147 #>>44332302 #>>44334878 #
2. doctorpangloss ◴[20 Jun 25 21:12 UTC] No.44332147[source]▶
Like hundreds of millions of people want to chat with a computer. At least.
replies(1): >>44332227 #
3. dvt ◴[20 Jun 25 21:21 UTC] No.44332227[source]▶
This is simply not true in the productivity space (which is the context here). People just want to get shit done.
replies(1): >>44353464 #
4. brulard ◴[20 Jun 25 21:31 UTC] No.44332302[source]▶
What do you see as an alternative? This is exactly what people need. To give quick instructions and have agent work on tasks across webpages/webapps. You say you "have many thoughts on fixing this". Can you share a better vision?
replies(1): >>44332394 #
5. dvt ◴[20 Jun 25 21:43 UTC] No.44332394[source]▶
Yes, it involves "recipes" for different "action types" based on a few things (past behavior, sensible "default" behavior, the context, etc.). For example, when looking at a storefront, the agent might want to give a few options (off the top of my head):

    - It knows you're low on milk, so it suggests buying milk
    - It can get a list of all deals, maybe even cross-checking with other storefronts
    - It knows your sister was looking for a planter, and it found a particularly cheap one, so it suggests texting it to her
    - Etc.
    - (You can of course still chat with the thing, if you so desire)
These recipes are difficult to come up with and hard to generalize (they also need to be categorized, and likely accurately picked from a [RAG?] database), but imo this is the future if AI agents, not yet another chatbox.
6. sunnybeetroot ◴[21 Jun 25 05:49 UTC] No.44334878[source]▶
Have you used Cursor or Claude Code or any others? I want to chat to a computer and get it to do my programming over writing the programming myself.
7. immibis ◴[23 Jun 25 08:01 UTC] No.44353464{3}[source]▶
By chatting with a computer. People in paper offices didn't want to "use a computer" either but they wanted to "get shit done" and using a computer ended up being the way to get shit done.