I would prefer this as a browser extension, not as its own browser application.
replies(4):
No invite system unlike bunch of others – you can download it today from our website or GitHub: https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS
--- Why bother building an alternative? We believe browsers will become the new operating systems, where we offload much bunch of our work to AI agents. But these agents will have access to all your sensitive data – emails, docs, on top of your browser history. Open-source, privacy-first alternatives need to exist.
We're not a search or ad company, so no weird incentives. Your data stays on your machine. You can use local LLMs with Ollama. We also support BYOK (bring your own keys), so no $200/month plans.
Another big difference vs Perplexity Comet: our agent runs locally in your browser (not on their server). You can actually watch it click around and do stuff, which is pretty cool! Short demo here: https://bit.ly/browserOS-demo
--- How we built? We patch Chromium's C++ source code with our changes, so we have the same security as Google Chrome. We also have an auto-updater for security patches and regular updates.
Working with Chromium's 15M lines of C++ has been another fun adventure that I'm writing a blog post on. Cursor/VSCode breaks at this scale, so we're back to using grep to find stuff and make changes. Claude code works surprisingly well too.
Building the binary takes ~3 hours on our M4 Max MacBook.
--- Next? We're just 2 people with a lot of work ahead (Firefox started with 3 hackers, history rhymes!). But we strongly believe that a privacy-first browser with local LLM support is more important than ever – since agents will have access to so much sensitive data.
Looking forward to any and all comments!
But we strongly believe that for building a good agent co-pilot we need bunch of changes at Chromium C++ code level. For example, chromium has a accessibility tree for every website, but doesn't expose it as an API to chrome extension. Having access to accessibility tree would greatly improve agent execution.
We are also building bunch of changes in C++ for agents to interact with websites -- functions like click, elements with indexes. You can inject JS for doing this but it is 20-40X slower.
From Google's perspective, extension are meant to be lightweight applications, with restricted access.
See Sciter. A very cool, super lightweight alternative to Electron, but unfortunately it seems like a single developer project and I could never get any of the examples to run.
Sciter uses quickjs and I just checked and its like 35-36x times slower than V8 JIT
Also another interesting rabbit hole is that I found Duktape in the quickjs benchmarks and I saw https://blogcpp.org/ as one of the projects within Duktape but I can't even see the project on github. We really need some better way of preserving open source stuff I guess
Not some rando's blog engine in C++, or other kinds of stupid throw-away code
Anyway <https://web.archive.org/web/20241122030659/https://github.co...> -> $(fossil clone https://code.rosaelefanten.org/blogcpp) which takes a stunning amount of time but then reports
Round-trips: 15 Artifacts sent: 0 received: 2751
Clone done, wire bytes sent: 4127 received: 124543126 remote: 2a03:4000:34:5e::1
Rebuilding repository meta-data...
100.0% complete...
Extra delta compression... none found
Vacuuming the database...
project-id: 40a055cb170ae83c46b4ed9bf3b6a60e6e541aa0
server-id: cee9059305219c887fd29c677cbafb372252518a
admin-user: mdaniel (password is "x2hEAaXUDj")
opening the new ./blogcpp.fossil repository in directory ./blogcpp...
3rdparty/ConfigParser/ConfigParser.cpp
...
project-name: BlogC++
repository: /home/runner/blogcpp.fossil
project-code: 40a055cb170ae83c46b4ed9bf3b6a60e6e541aa0
checkout: fbea390316bc3aace7de0a9ccdba90ecc1949a10 2024-12-17 22:03:16 UTC
parent: 9e604d205e7922ef1af87952fe1bebef0cbac336 2022-01-15 02:22:33 UTC
tags: trunk
comment: fuck you github (user: Cthulhux)
check-ins: 20CSS2 is closer to trivial, but CSS3 is practically a 3D game engine with all of its matrix transforms, transitions, animations, variables - not to mention all the different layout schemes (Sciter blogged about introducing display:flex and display:grid two months ago)
The most interesting part of Sciter to me is that data persistence goes way beyond localStorage (string key: string value) or filesystem API, instead it's DyBase [0][1] behind the scenes, which looks to be a very intriguing style of storing trees of data in the host language's datatype (including whatever classes you define) without mucking about with the leaky abstractions of an ORM.
[0] https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/docs/md/s...