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Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

(github.com)
313 points felarof | 2 comments | 20 Jun 25 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.532s | 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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ajb ◴[20 Jun 25 22:04 UTC] No.44332537[source]▶
I think there is big value in something that is on the side of the user, in particular in processing user-hostile material. Here are some concrete use cases:

* Buying a sofa. You want to filter for sofas of a specific size, with certain features, marketing sites want to feed you a bunch of marketing slop for each sofa before giving you the details . This generalises to many domains.

* You have a few friends who are still stuck on Facebook, you want to be notified if they post anything and avoid other rubbish

* The local neighborhood is stuck organising in a Facebook group or even worse, nextdoor. You want to see any new posts except for those couple of guys who are always posting the same thing.

* A government consultation website has been put up, but as a hurdle the consultation document has been combinatorially expanded to 763 pages by bureaucratic authoring techniques. You want to undo the combinatorial expansion do you can identify things you actually care about.

replies(2): >>44333043 #>>44333273 #
1. 8organicbits ◴[20 Jun 25 23:21 UTC] No.44333043[source]▶
> Buying a sofa. You want to filter for sofas of a specific size, with certain features

This jumped out to me as well. Even sites like Amazon lack per-item-cost sorting, which can be really helpful when buying in bulk. Historically we've seen people use scraping and data science to build sites like https://diskprices.com/; without using LLMs. If LLMs are useful for those types of tasks, perhaps we'll see a surge in similar sites instead of end users doing prompt engineering in their browser.

> You want to see any new posts except for those couple of guys who are always posting the same thing.

It looks like nextdoor supports blocking users, although other sites may not.

https://help.nextdoor.com/s/article/block-a-neighbor

replies(1): >>44337113 #
2. ajb ◴[21 Jun 25 12:36 UTC] No.44337113[source]▶
Yeah definitely. Also a problem when buying by weight or length. Length will be especially challenging for an LLM, as it needs to pick the right dimension.