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Comment by arjunchint | Hacker News Reader

We had this exact thought as well, you don't need a whole browser to implement the agentic capabilities, you can implement the whole thing with the limited permissions of a browser extension.

There are plenty of zero day exploit patches that Google immediately rolls out and not to mention all the other features that Google doesn't push to Chromium. I wouldn't trust a random open source project for my day-to-day browser.

Check out rtrvr.ai for a working implementation, we are an AI Web Agent browser extension that meets you where your workflows already are.

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Brave Browser (70M+ users) has validated that a chromium fork can be viable path. And it can in fact provide better privacy and security.

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).

Honestly excited to see the benchmark result and comparison!

Our benchmark results [https://www.rtrvr.ai/blog/web-bench-results] show that we are 7x faster than browser-use so curious to see if your claims live up to the hype

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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