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Re:Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet by esperent on Friday July 11, 2025 @02:39AM (#44529016)
> I wouldn't trust a random open source project for my day-to-day browser.

Given that you're working on a direct competitor, this comment reads as fearmongering, designed to drive people over to your product.

Re:Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet by arjunchint on Friday July 11, 2025 @04:01AM (#44529489)
I personally talked to another agentic browser player, fellou.ai, in the space asking them how they are keeping up with all the Chromium pushes as you need a dedicated team to handle the merges, they flat out told me they are targeting tech enthusiasts that are not interested in the security of their browser as much.

As an ex-Google engineer I know the immense engineering efforts and infrastructure setup to develop Chrome. It is very implausible that two people can handle all the effort to serve a secure browser with 15+ million lines of constantly changing C++ code.

A sandboxxed browser extension is the natural form factor for these agentic capabilities.

Re:Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet by felarof on Friday July 11, 2025 @12:52PM (#44534388)
Also, ex-Google engineer here :) Rtrvr looks like great product too!

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.

Re:Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet by Imustaskforhelp on Friday July 11, 2025 @05:38AM (#44530206)
Conflict of interests at its heart.

I mean, I have no skin in the game but I mean, there are people who are using Dia (browser company) and Dia is closed source so it would be nice to see those people jumping to browser OS atleast.

I personally would prefer it as an extension but there are some limitations as the author of browserOS noted within extensions but I just wish that google/chromium can push those changes upstream I guess.

Re:Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet by felarof on Friday July 11, 2025 @12:57PM (#44534464)
Thank you for your support! Yes, we want to do some cool things that we can't do as extension.

C++ APIs for dom tree, a11y. We eventually want to ship a small fine-tuned LLM and package with browser binary too.

Just getting started!