[HN Gopher] Show HN: BrowserOS - "Claude Cowork" in the browser
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Show HN: BrowserOS - "Claude Cowork" in the browser
Hey HN! We're Nithin and Nikhil, twin brothers building BrowserOS
(YC S24). We're an open-source, privacy-first alternative to the AI
browsers from big labs. The big differentiator: on BrowserOS you
can use local LLMs or BYOK and run the agent entirely on the client
side, so your company/sensitive data stays on your machine! Today
we're launching filesystem access... just like Claude Cowork, our
browser agent can read files, write files, run shell commands! But
honestly, we didn't plan for this. It turns out the privacy
decision we made 9 months ago accidentally positioned us for this
moment. The architectural bet we made 9 months ago: Unlike other
AI browsers (ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity Comet) where the agent loop
runs server-side, we decided early on to run our agent entirely on
your machine (client side). But building everything on the client
side wasn't smooth. We initially built our agent loop inside a
Chrome extension. But we kept hitting walls -- service worker being
single thread JS; not having access to NodeJS libraries. So we made
the hard decision 2 months ago to throw away everything and start
from scratch. In the new architecture, our agent loop sits in a
standalone binary that we ship alongside our Chromium. And we use
gemini-cli for the agent loop with some tweaks! We wrote a neat
adapter to translate between Gemini format and Vercel AI SDK
format. You can look at our entire codebase here:
https://git.new/browseros-agent How we give browser access to
filesystem: When Claude Cowork launched, we realized something:
because Atlas and Comet run their agent loop server-side, there's
no good way for their agent to access your files without uploading
them to the server first. But our agent was already local. Adding
filesystem access meant just... opening the door (with your
permissions ofc). Our agent can now read and write files just like
Claude Code. What you can actually do today: a) Organize files in
my desktop folder https://youtu.be/NOZ7xjto6Uc b) Open top 5 HN
links, extract the details and write summary into a HTML file
https://youtu.be/uXvqs_TCmMQ --- Where we are now If you haven't
tried us since the last Show HN
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44523409), give us another
shot. The new architecture unlocked a ton of new features, and
we've grown to 8.5K GitHub stars and 100K+ downloads: c) You can
now build more reliable workflows using n8n-like graph
https://youtu.be/H_bFfWIevSY d) You can also use BrowserOS as an
MCP server in Cursor or Claude Code https://youtu.be/5nevh00lckM
We are very bullish on browser being the right platform for a
Claude Cowork like agent. Browser is the most commonly used app by
knowledge workers (emails, docs, spreadsheets, research, etc). And
even Anthropic recognizes this -- for Claude Cowork, they have
janky integration with browser via a chrome extension. But owning
the entire stack allows us to build differentiated features that
wouldn't be possible otherwise. Ex: Browser ACLs. Agents can do
dumb or destructive things, so we're adding browser-level
guardrails (think IAM for agents): "role(agent): can never click
buy" or "role(agent): read-only access on my bank's homepage."
Curious to hear your take on this and the overall thesis. We'll be
in the comments. Thanks for reading! GitHub:
https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS Download:
https://browseros.com (available for Mac, Windows, Linux!)
Author : felarof
Score : 37 points
Date : 2026-01-22 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ivysly wrote:
| why are you calling this an OS
| felarof wrote:
| Good question. We think the browser is becoming the new OS. It
| doesn't really matter anymore if you're on Windows, macOS, or
| Linux--the browser is where most work already happens.
|
| We see a future where it's the main gateway to everything, and
| where agents live and work alongside you inside the browser.
| That's why we call it BrowserOS. :)
| p1necone wrote:
| Is this really true? Mobile device users are all mostly
| forced to use apps rather than the browser for most stuff,
| and people on desktop PCs/laptops are probably either using
| them for gaming (all desktop apps), or work where a lot of
| stuff is desktop apps.
|
| Sure regular consumer stuff like social media is webapps (if
| they're not mobile only), and if you're interacting with like
| salesforce or a customer support tracker or an issue tracker
| or something you're likely using a webapp, but the move to
| mobile devices for most consumer stuff means that people
| still using PCs are largely power users.
| felarof wrote:
| > if you're interacting with like salesforce or a customer
| support tracker or an issue tracker or something you're
| likely using a webapp
|
| Precisely. I think most knowledge work (especially at
| business) still happens browser. That is the workflow we
| want to target!
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| IAM for agents sounds interesting but how is it reliably
| enforced? You also built evals?
| felarof wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| > how is it reliably enforced?
|
| At the chromium level, you have access to every single DOM
| element and coordinate space around it. So, when a click
| happens either user or agent, we have a neat way of enforcing
| required action (either allow it or nullify the click).
|
| We are still at early version. And mostly targeting enterprise
| sites (like SAP) which don't change that often.
|
| What use case did you have in mind?
| tekacs wrote:
| https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS/issues/99#issuecom...
|
| I didn't hear back there, but huzzah, it looks like this is in
| there. I'm glad to see it!
| felarof wrote:
| Thanks for initial feature request! We do read every single
| request :)
|
| Yes, we expose BrowserOS as an MCP server -- that you can use
| from claude code, cursor, opencode, etc --
| https://docs.browseros.com/features/use-with-claude-code
|
| MCP server works out of box (unlike Chrome DevTools MCP which
| requires tricky setup).
| Johnny_Bonk wrote:
| What would be great is if it could work in the browser like
| Claude in chrome and communicate (with my control) back to
| objects on my desktop like my ide for example or really anything
| felarof wrote:
| Ohh, interesting, technically this should already be possible.
| Because we already package gemini-cli into the sidecar (bun)
| binary. We just have to create a good UX.
|
| What angle are you looking at this from? Is it for convenience?
| Or do you not like terminal UI and need a web-friendly UI for
| these agents?
| mossTechnician wrote:
| > we're adding browser-level guardrails (think IAM for agents)
|
| This sounds interesting, but where would I go to see these
| guardrails and their implementation? I tried searching in the
| repository and couldn't find them.
| felarof wrote:
| We are still in early versions of the feature! Haven't released
| on our repo yet.
|
| What use case did you have? Happy to show a demo of current
| version we have (you can hit me up on discord or slack -- links
| available on our repo)
| arjunchint wrote:
| Hey cool stuff since last update!
|
| I still don't buy the we needed it to be a whole Browser and not
| a Chrome Extension argument:
|
| - your interface is still literally a chrome extension side panel
|
| - none of the agentic browsers from the bigger players like Atlas
| and Comet really took off either
|
| I do think the server side integration is required:
|
| - with rtrvr.ai a ton of users are integrating our web agent
| chrome extension via Remote MCP from chatgpt.com as well as
| triggering as an API endpoint remotely. Your implementation is
| limited to only local connections as I understand.
|
| - the biggest unlock for users is running at scale, so just being
| able to launch a hundred cloud browsers, do a task, and return
| results while you do other things. So we see hybrid cloud/local
| execution as the key unlock for this year
|
| Your workflow pipeline is really cool! Any blog post/summary on
| how you set it up?
|
| Last year was a lot of technical builders exploring the
| capabilities, and I am excited for this year of making these
| agentic browsers useful!
| felarof wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| > whole Browser and not a Chrome Extension argument
|
| Both of us are definitely biased to think our own approach is
| better :)
|
| But without owning the binary, we couldn't shipped today's
| feature -- Agent with access to your filesystem and being able
| to run shell commands like Claude Cowork.
|
| > your interface is still literally a chrome extension side
| panel
|
| Yep, our interface is a chrome extension to make iterating on
| the UX faster. But it uses a ton of C++ APIs that we expose
| under `chrome.browseros.*`
|
| > Your workflow pipeline is really cool! Any blog post/summary
| on how you set it up?
|
| Thanks! We'll look into publishing a blog soon!
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