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Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet (browseros.com)

291 points by felarof ↗ HN
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!

41 comments

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rpastuszak
Congrats!

How are you planning to make the project sustainable (from a financial, and dev work/maintenance pov)?

eGQjxkKF6fif
Whats the roadmap looking like for Linux?

I don't have Mac or Windows.

layer8
I would prefer this as a browser extension, not as its own browser application.
daureg
> our agent runs locally in your browser (not on their server)

That's definitely a nice feature. Did you measure the impact on laptop battery life in a typical scenario (assuming there is such a scenario at this early stage)

zebomon
This is very exciting given the rumor that OpenAI will be launching a (presumably not open source) browser of their own this summer. I've joined your Discord, so will try it soon and report back there. Congrats on launching!
closetkantian
This looks like a great project.

What are the system requirements? And shouldn't they be listed on your website?

paul7986
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.
ivape
What is the default BrowserOS model? Is it local, and if so, what inferencing server are you using?
mdaniel
> --- 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.

So you rebuild your browser on every Chromium release? Because that's the risk: often changes go into Chromium with very innocent looking commit messages than are released from embargo 90 days later in their CVE reference

arjunchint
Do you have any benchmarks to share like Halluminate's Web Bench?
darkmuck
This is similar to the chrome extension nanobrowser. https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser
lowwave
From a quick scan of the page, they seems to use some kind external LLM API keys. The appear of the poster project seems to be locally run LLM (assuming tranfomer.js ).
DANmode
Is BrowserOS-OS on the roadmap?

(Will you ever make a better FydeOS, or if you're laser-focused, perhaps be open to sharing some with them, so they could?)

azinman2
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!

moneywaters
Yeah it should have your preferences for things to do stuff based on your aesthetics but I see how it could become security nightmare
bkyan
Is there a way to hook BrowserOS up as a sub-agent for an orchestration agent/system?
5xpB7n8tdbtoP
The windows .zip shared on your github release page gets flagged as a Trojan by windows defender. Why is it a zip in the first place?
thegeek108
The name is confused. I think it is a web-based OS in the first place.
msephton
How does the competition do with the same demo tasks?
rvz
> 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.

How does this make money? Surely this will have a cloud offering?

But if it doesn't make money, I can only assume that the team will be acqui-hired to answer that question.

felarof
> How does this make money? Surely this will have a cloud offering?

Our plan is to make the consumer version of the browser for free and sell licenses for enterprise version.

This is similar to how many open-source projects sustain development.

And enterprise browsers are picking up -- Island browser, Talon browser.

tzury
This is not Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

This is the real thing, the original if you will.

As for Perplexity, to me this company and line of product are seemed as the alternative to anything great in AI.

felarof
Haha, thank you!

As a small startup we cannot outspend Perplexity Comet in marketing, so we just said open-source alternative so that people get what we are building.

dxroshan
What a joke project! Chromium has a over 35 million lines of code. These people applied a few patches on it, and then advertising it as if they have developed a new browser. The same goes for Comet also.

From their GitHub readme:

> but Chrome hasn't evolved much in 10 years

Really?? It is not true. You guys please go and check release notes and commits log for Chrome/Chromium project for the past 10 years.

matheist
> We are also building an LLM-based ad-blocker after Chrome blocked uBlock Origin.

Since it's a Chromium fork, why not re-enable uBlock Origin instead?

Daedren
Chromium will remove the Manifest V2 APIs, and none of these forks want to maintain them. Brave also chose to have their own built-in adblocker.

The real question is, why not opt to fork Firefox who is doing that work for them.

askl
The demo looks like a mediocre solution looking for a problem. I can order toothpaste without an LLM faster and more reliably.
whatevsmate
I want to see the mouse cursor moving and clicking, and keys typed by the AI appearing onscreen in realtime like you see in software product tutorials.

The jumpiness of pages switching and things changing when an AI is driving is extremely disorienting. I find it hard to follow a thread of continuity in the page flashes and ui changes as the bot acts.

Right now it’s like watching a screen recording with no hint as to what I’m “supposed” to be focusing on.

Regardless - I have use cases for this in the mcp/browser automation vein another user mentioned so super interested to see where this goes.

felarof
This is very useful feedback, thank you!

We will look into add a cursor movements; key typing should already appear like a human would (but probably we can slow it down a bit).