Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

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.

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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.

[ Parent | on HN ]