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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: 0.563s | 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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mullingitover ◴[20 Jun 25 22:01 UTC] No.44332515[source]▶
On 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 potential for prompt injection to turn your life upside down in a matter of seconds. I like the concept but I wouldn't touch this thing with a ten foot pole unless everyone in the supply chain was PCI/SOC2/ISO 27001 certified, the whole supply chain has been vetted, and I have blood oaths about its security from third party analysts.

replies(1): >>44332741 #
felarof ◴[20 Jun 25 22:35 UTC] No.44332741[source]▶
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.

replies(2): >>44332892 #>>44333503 #
adamoshadjivas ◴[20 Jun 25 22:58 UTC] No.44332892[source]▶
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

replies(1): >>44333117 #
1. felarof ◴[20 Jun 25 23:35 UTC] No.44333117[source]▶
I see, definitely agree that more work is needed in figuring out the right UX here. Probably open a shadow browser with OAuth sessions of only a small subset of sites required for the task?
replies(1): >>44337168 #
2. lolinder ◴[21 Jun 25 12:47 UTC] No.44337168[source]▶
That would help, but who defines which sites are required for the task? If it's the LLM you haven't solved prompt injection because the LLM can be persuaded to open other sites that the user didn't intend.