BrowserOS

Productivity

ai browser

SHOW HN2025

291points
122comments
#191of 3,837 in 2025
Top 5%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

9 positive, 30 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 20 critical, out of 61 comments about the project. Thread score -0.15.

Idea: 6 for, 12 againstExecution: 0 for, 7 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 1 againstPricing: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Watching the agent act locally is appealing

    From 2 comments
    • Love the direction here. Local-first, open-source agentic browsers feel inevitable as AI gets more deeply embedded in our workflows. Watching the agent actually click around (vs.…
      anupj on HN
    • 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…
      zebomon on HN
  • Open-source local-first agentic browser is needed

    From 2 comments
    • Love the direction here. Local-first, open-source agentic browsers feel inevitable as AI gets more deeply embedded in our workflows. Watching the agent actually click around (vs.…
      anupj on HN
    • I use OpenAI deep research feature a ton, what's cool about this is being able to see it do the research live vs. being told just hte steps in text format (I always have to go…
      ertok on HN

Objections

  • Agent is slow and needs hand-holding

    From 1 comment
    • I didn't realize you all had changed your name and I'd already installed Nxtscape and thought something was wrong when I opened up BrowserOS and saw the same UI and fox emoji…
      dockercompost on HN
  • Chromium fork maintenance and CVE patching burden

    From 2 comments
    • > --- 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…
      mdaniel on HN
    • I love the vision of a privacy‑first, open‑source browser that runs AI agents locally, but shipping a custom Chromium fork is a huge maintenance lift so how will you handle…
      andy_ng on HN
  • Demo tasks are not compelling

    From 2 comments
    • The demo looks like a mediocre solution looking for a problem. I can order toothpaste without an LLM faster and more reliably.
      askl on HN
    • 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…
      azinman2 on HN

Requests

  • Linux support

    From 2 comments
    • Whats the roadmap looking like for Linux? I don't have Mac or Windows.
      eGQjxkKF6fif on HN
    • Where is my linux version? A lot of researchers who could really use this project would be sitting with a dual gpu setup on a linux machine. Would be an instant hit with the…
      avallark on HN
  • Homebrew availability

    From 1 comment
  • Benchmarks

    From 1 comment
    • Do you have any benchmarks to share like Halluminate's Web Bench?
      arjunchint on HN

Questions

  • How the business makes money

    From 2 comments
    • > 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…
      rvz on HN
    • What is your future revenue model?
      jerrygenser on HN
  • Why Chromium instead of Firefox

    From 1 comment
    • If this is a privacy first browser, why wasn´t Firefox used when it is much better out of the box for this approach? All security and privacy focused webbrowser use Firefox. Like…
      MasterYoda on HN

Alternatives named

  • Perplexity Comet

    From 2 comments
    • My main gripe - and I cannot sufficiently emphasise how fundamental this is - is that it seems, just as with Comet, this is not actually the integration of LLM agency into the…
      xebulon on HN
    • 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…
      tzury on HN
  • Brave

    From 1 comment
    • This was definitely a hard choice. We spoke to folks who had built browser on top of webkit and they spent nearly 2years just fixing random bugs and getting sites to work. I'm…
      felarof on HN
  • Nanobrowser

    From 1 comment
    • This is similar to the chrome extension nanobrowser. https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser
      darkmuck on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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