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Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser

(github.com)
314 points felarof | 3 comments | 20 Jun 25 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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

1. varenc ◴[21 Jun 25 01:06 UTC] No.44333635[source]▶
This is quite cool! Very excited for this concept. Kudos to launching on HN!

some genuine feedback on a frustrating early experience:

- I ran the suggested "Group all my tabs by topic" in productivity agent mode. It worked great.

- I then asked it to remove all tab groups and reset things, but was told this:

    This is a browser automation task. Please use **Agent Mode** for web interactions like clicking, filling forms, navigating sites, or extracting web content.
- Tried "agent mode" and was told:

    This is a productivity task. Please use **Chat Mode** for tab management, bookmarks, sessions, history, and content analysis.
- Basically was being sent back and forth. Went back to productivity mode and argued with it for a bit. The closest I could come to it removing all tabs groups was creating a new tab group encompassing all tabs, but couldn't get it to remove groups entirely. I'm guessing it might lack that API?

Overall, it'd be nice if every browser level action it took had an undo button. Or at least if it was smart enough/able to remove the tab groups it just created.

Will keep playing with it more.

edit1: one more weird issue: While running the chat interface on chrome internal pages like chrome://extensions, it would randomly browse me to google.com for some reason.

edit2: confirmed that productivity mode lacks a tool to ungroup tabs, just a tool to create tab groups.

replies(1): >>44333795 #
2. felarof ◴[21 Jun 25 01:44 UTC] No.44333795[source]▶
Thank you so much for this feedback! And sorry for the annoying experience. I'll debug and fix it. this still early beta version :(

We have this agent mode and chat mode both with separate tools. I think the "prompt" today is not good enough, will see if there is a better way to address it.

Regarding un-grouping, that API is currently missing in chrome. I'm currently looking to add this support.

Hmm couple of people have asked for "undo" now. will see how we can implement this. I imagine something like cursor's "restore checkpoint" would be neat.

Quick question, do you think these productivity features are critical in your day to day workflow? Any specific examples you can share? :)

replies(1): >>44333884 #
3. varenc ◴[21 Jun 25 02:04 UTC] No.44333884[source]▶
> Quick question, do you think these productivity features are critical in your day to day workflow? Any specific examples you can share? :)

hah, absolutely not! That specific nit was pretty low priority... I definitely don't imagine I'll be asking it to ungroup tabs regularly, or if ever. But the loop of it being stuck between Chat and Agent mode seems like more generic, and might happen whenever there's a prompt neither agent can handle. Ideally it would have just said "I can't ungroup tabs".

Restoring to a checkpoint could be nice, but might not be worth it in the early stage if its high effort for you. I've yet to do anything actually useful/productivity focused with Nxtscape yet, but will keep exploring.