Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

1. BrowserOS

   1 6 3,961 9.8 Python

   BrowserOS is an open-source agentic web browser.

   

   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!

2. InfluxDB

   www.influxdata.com featured

   InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

   

3. nanobrowser

   2 9 8,781 9.5 TypeScript

   Open-Source Chrome extension for AI-powered web automation. Run multi-agent workflows using your own LLM API key. Alternative to OpenAI Operator.

   

4. blitz

   3 25 2,817 9.8 Rust

   A radically modular HTML/CSS rendering engine (by DioxusLabs)

   

5. sciter-js-sdk

   4 44 1,632 9.3 Pawn

   Discontinued Sciter.JS - Sciter but with QuickJS on board instead of my TIScript

   good callout wrt being slower than JIT. ofc for certain applications it's not a showstopper, ie, if you're not using javascript for your MVC but doing more of a progressive enhancement thing.

   CSS2 is closer to trivial, but CSS3 is practically a 3D game engine with all of its matrix transforms, transitions, animations, variables - not to mention all the different layout schemes (Sciter blogged about introducing display:flex and display:grid two months ago)

   The most interesting part of Sciter to me is that data persistence goes way beyond localStorage (string key: string value) or filesystem API, instead it's DyBase [0][1] behind the scenes, which looks to be a very intriguing style of storing trees of data in the host language's datatype (including whatever classes you define) without mucking about with the leaky abstractions of an ORM.

   [0] https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/docs/md/s...

   [1] http://www.garret.ru/dybase.html

Suggest a related project