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Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

(www.browseros.com)
281 points felarof | 5 comments | 10 Jul 25 17:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.644s | source

Hey HN, we're a YC startup building an open-source, privacy-first alternative to Perplexity Comet.

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!

1. paul7986 ◴[10 Jul 25 22:36 UTC] No.44526459[source]▶
So would this or any AI browser go out and fetch a list of the best deals for my trip to Iceland? After Show me all the options it has found for flights, hotels, car rentals and show cheapest/best prices with all details (fly out of and into with times) to even allow me to pay for each item on same page I asked it to do so? As well it could group the overall best deal with details and then i can just click to pay instantly and or make some edits.
replies(3): >>44526766 #>>44527532 #>>44527932 #
2. felarof ◴[10 Jul 25 23:14 UTC] No.44526766[source]▶
We just started cooking, very soon you should be able to do this!
3. dotancohen ◴[11 Jul 25 01:23 UTC] No.44527532[source]▶
It seems that the next evolution of SEO will be too skip the SE and simply O for the LLMs.
4. flymasterv ◴[11 Jul 25 02:36 UTC] No.44527932[source]▶
Orbitz.com has done this for 20 years.
replies(1): >>44533060 #
5. paul7986 ◴[11 Jul 25 15:12 UTC] No.44533060[source]▶
I can ask Orbitz with one question without going to Orbitz to say create me a full itinerary with the best prices for my Iceland trip?

That's advantage of LLMs you dont have to go to the websites and soon you can just talk to your LLM like chatGPT or an advanced Siri to do this and boom it does all the research and shows you the top deals for you to purchase with a click (after you reviewed the prefered one and or talk to the LLM who makes the updates/edits you need before u do one click purchase).

If I was Orbitz I would be begging to work with Open AI / chatGPT (use Orbitz API) before Open AI does it themselves. Website visitation is and going to be dropping precipitiously along with the field of web design and development. That's my own field but it's so clear to me as technological evolutions that get adopted are the ones that reduce steps and make things easier to more magical.