Re:Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet
by felarof on Friday July 11, 2025 @10:54AM
(#44532827)
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 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 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.