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314 points felarof | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.64s | source

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

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deepdarkforest ◴[] No.44331571[source]
This 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 also, and they have good distribution already.

Good luck, but in your place i would at least start with something that a certain ICP needs more. Many, many manhours have been wasted by ambitious technical founders on taking down Chrome. (many also starting from a chrome fork itself). But none of them succeeded. We only have limited energy

replies(1): >>44331929 #
1. felarof ◴[] No.44331929[source]
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?)

replies(2): >>44332731 #>>44332780 #
2. throwaway314155 ◴[] No.44332731[source]
As long as you don't implement ANY cryptocurrency features or ad-replacement features. I realize you've gotta make money at some point but the current browser landscape is so damn depressing. Even Mozilla Firefox has lost the trust of some of its diminishing userbase.
3. deepdarkforest ◴[] No.44332780[source]
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)

replies(1): >>44333226 #
4. felarof ◴[] No.44333226[source]
Good point. Our thinking so far has been to build good open-source product and then offer enterprise version as paid.

Island browser, chrome enterprise have kinda of validated the need for enterprise version of browser with VPN and DLP engine (data-loss-prevention).