· Quick Take · 2 min read
BrowserOS: Free Agentic Browser That Works
Get hands-on with the future of web browsing through BrowserOS, a free open-source alternative to invitation-only Perplexity Comet.
You probably already heard about Perplexity Comet, a browser equipped with AI agents that can do tasks for you. Comet currently requires invitation. You have to join the waitlist or upgrade Perplexity Max ($200/month), which is too much to try new cool things for normal people.
You can experience what an agentic browser is like by trying BrowserOS, an open source alternative of Perplexity Comet, made by the BrowserOS team backed by Y Combinator. You can download BrowserOS on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Totally free. And you can use it right away without any further setup or LLM API keys. The BrowserOS team is nice enough to host an LLM service for users to use for free. If you want to use frontier LLM models of your choice, you can provide your own API key (at your cost), and you can also get some free models on OpenRouter, or even self-host on your PC to ensure privacy.
It can help you automatically do tasks like book appointments and find good plumbers. It can also help you save money, like doing price comparison, finding and applying promo or coupon codes, and canceling unwanted subscriptions. And much more when you need to learn new things, do research, plan travel, etc, up to your imagination.
In the example above, I asked it to find some 1 star Michelin restaurant in London, French cuisine. It will go to the Michelin Guide website, filter location, cuisine, and star, then return the list for you.
You’ll have a weird feeling when using an agentic browser at first, as instead of you clicking, someone else is clicking for you. Kind of like the first time you got out of an Uber ride without giving money to the driver. Just remember, do not use it to do anything important like banking transactions yet.
Now is a very early phase of agentic browsers. We don’t know if they’ll catch on and replace the normal browser or not. Trying this new thing gives you front row experience of the newest applications of this AI boom, what is different, what they can do, and what they can change in our life.
