How to install Astro

Every step written out, for people who have never opened a terminal. Pick the setup you have.

README

Astro

An answer engine that can actually use your browser

Perplexity-style search, deep research and multi-model comparison — on top of a browser its agent can genuinely drive. Bring your own key, or reuse a subscription you already pay for. Search costs nothing and never leaves your machine.

Setup · Attribution

What it is

Two open-source projects, joined at the seam where each is weakest.

Simplicity is a very good answer engine with no browser under it. BrowserOS is a real browser whose agent can drive pages, but it had no retrieval at all — its agent had to open Google and scrape the results page like a person.

Astro puts Simplicity's UI and search pipeline on top of BrowserOS's browser automation. You get an answer engine with citations and an agent that can open tabs, click, read and fill forms — in the same window.


Search	Free and private. A local SearXNG is provisioned on first use — no Docker, no account, no search API key
Deep Research	Plans queries, searches in parallel, reads the best sources in full, refines, and cites
Model Council	Several models answer from one shared retrieval; a chair compares them and surfaces the disagreements
Browser use	16 CDP tools — tabs, navigation, clicking, reading, forms, screenshots
Your models	Claude Code, Codex and Copilot subscriptions; any API key; or fully local via Ollama / LM Studio

Scraped page content is fenced as untrusted data before it reaches a model, so a web page cannot issue instructions to your agent.

What is not built

Stated plainly, because the navigation shows more than the code does:

Computer — Comet's version runs tasks in a cloud sandbox and keeps working with the laptop closed. Not built. The pieces that exist are deep_research, model_council and the browser tools, all synchronous and local.
Spaces, Artifacts, Skills, Memory — navigation entries only.
File generation (.pptx / .xlsx) — absent here and in both upstreams.

Licences

Astro is AGPL-3.0, inherited from BrowserOS, which is based on Chromium and uses patches from ungoogled-chromium.

The vendored Simplicity/Vane code is MIT, © ItzCrazyKns. ATTRIBUTION.md carries the notice, maps every ported file to its source, and documents where this fork deliberately diverges from both.