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Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

(www.browseros.com)
281 points felarof | 4 comments | 10 Jul 25 17:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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. azinman2 ◴[11 Jul 25 01:03 UTC] No.44527426[source]▶
The demo buying toothpaste shows the difficulty of these tasks. Toothpaste itself was very underspecified, and it essentially randomly chose from a huge list. Some tasks may have past actions that could help guide, others won't have any to inform. Failure cases abound -- maybe the toothpaste you previously bought is no longer available. Then what? Ultimately how much time did this particular example save since you need to double check the result anyway? This is what doomed Alexa for the purchasing experience that Amazon assumed it would enable in the first place.

I think it'd be better to show more non-trivial examples where the time savings is clear, and the failure cases are minimized... or even better how it's going to recover from those failure cases. Do I get a bespoke UI for the specific problem? Talk to it via chat?

This whole world is non-trivial. Good luck!

replies(1): >>44527559 #
2. felarof ◴[11 Jul 25 01:28 UTC] No.44527559[source]▶
Great points! For sure, the whole agentic browsers space is still super early.

We are also just getting started and trying to narrow down on a high-value niche use-case.

There are few repetitive, boring use-cases where time saving could be meaningful -- one example: Walmart 3rd-party sellers routinely (multiple times a day) keep checking prices of the competitor products to price their products appropriately. This could be easily automated with current agentic browsers.

replies(1): >>44527583 #
3. byteknight ◴[11 Jul 25 01:31 UTC] No.44527583[source]▶
But in reality, would much more consistently be automated by a single playwright script.
replies(1): >>44527615 #
4. felarof ◴[11 Jul 25 01:37 UTC] No.44527615{3}[source]▶
True, there are plenty of libs already available to do such an automation if you are (or can hire a) dev.

But for non-technical folks, agentic browsers seems like a good UX to build such and many more automations.