820 karma · joined August 23, 2014
Definitely understand that keeping up with security patches is important. And this is an engineering challenge and not implausible to do -- Perplexity is 1/1000th the size of Google and they could be build a better product. So, "you can just do things".
We are still on day 1 of launch. We will only get better from here. And we won't be 2 people forever. We plan to hire, expand team and take on the engineering challenges.
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.
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.
But we are working on adding built-in adblockers just like Brave + enhancing it to detect more ad formats using lightweight local LLM.
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 sure firefox/gecko engine would probably work better than webkit, but the point still is: if we don't use chromium, a lot of work does have go into fixing website compatibility issues, adding support for extension. We're 2 person startup and chromium codebase was easier to build on top of and provides a solid baseline.
And Brave has shown that you can build a privacy-focused browser on top of chromium still.
In the agentic browser era, I think there are so many low hanging fruits on privacy which are more important to address -- sending all your sensitive data to Perplexity Comet to sell ads is a pretty bad option right now. Supporting local LLM, letting folks bring their own API keys is crucial.
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).
We were thinking of implement MCP protocol into the browser, so the browser can be an MCP server (that exposes bunch of tools -- navigation, click, extract) and you can connect that to your agent, would that work?
What is your use-case? Happy to chat on discord! https://discord.gg/YKwjt5vuKr
I'll check out FydeOS!
But for non-technical folks, agentic browsers seems like a good UX to build such and many more automations.
Chrome extensions is not a bad idea too. Just saying that owning the underlying source code has some strong advantages in the long term (being able to use C++ for a11y tree, DOM handling, etc -- which will be 20-40X faster than injecting JS using chrome extension).
We are working on smaller, fine-tuned model too, which will be the default soon! It should be much faster and precise at navigation tasks.
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.
You can bring your own API keys and change the default to any model you local.
Or better run model locally using Ollama and use that!
What use-cases do you have in mind? like scraping?
hardware requirements are minimal, same as Google Chrome, if you BYOK API keys for agents and are not running LLMs locally.
Browser wars have begun.
> that OpenAI will be launching a (presumably not open source) browser of their own this summer.
For sure, won't be open-source. I bet in some parallel world, openAI would be non-profit and actually open-source AI :)
If you run LLMs locally (using Ollama) and use that in our browser, that would impact battery life for sure.
From Google's perspective, extension are meant to be lightweight applications, with restricted access.
chatGPT+o3 search is much better.
My typical workflow is fire the question to Google AI mode and chatGPT+o3 at the same -- AI mode is fast but meh answer, chatGPT is slower but pretty good answer always.
we have macOS and windows build as of now.