The Latent Browser

Hallucinating the latent web since 2022

See one of the earliest demos here: https://twitter.com/flngr/status/1609616068057698304

Project status update (March 2024)

The Latent Browser is back after a year of hiatus!

By popular demand (see this or this thread) an effort has been made to upgrade it to the latest version of the dependencies (well, most of them), and fix the code to make it run again!

Note: It has been a long time since I've worked on this project, so a lot of things changed since then. I've had to migrate from Next 12 to Next 14, Webpack to Bun, davinci to GPT-4 etc.

It is still possible that some things are broken when you try it.

What is The Latent Browser

The Latent Browser is a desktop application designed like a web browser, which hallucinates web search results (the resultds are fictious and are generated by a LLM) and web pages.

Technology

The Latent Browser is a web application designed to run locally on your machine.

The app is 99% React, Tailwind, TypeScript, and NextJS. The runtime is Tauri, which is written in Rust (but the Latent Browser itself doesn't really use Rust).

March 2024 update: I never really had the time to package it as a standalone "drag & drop install" application (well actually I did try but there were some bugs, and then I started working on other projects).

Where can I get in touch / follow you?

I'm always working on various AI projects, so I've setup and Discord and all.

You can find more info by following my Linktree here: https://linktr.ee/FLNGR.

How to run it

For the moment you need to fetch the code and run it on your machine.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have installed the prerequisites for your OS:

curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Running the latent borwser

Running the standalone app (recommended for users)

bun i
bun tauri dev

Running the app in Chrome (recommended for developers)

bun i
bun next dev
open http://localhost:3000

Packaging the Desktop app

To be continued (the app has been rebooted in March 2024, and most instructions are deprecated).

Note: The Latent Browser is using Tauri V2 but the doc isn't complete yet: https://beta.tauri.app/guides/build

Using the browser

Working (most of the time) examples

Here are some examples to get you started:

• a back-office application to manage users. There is a table with editable cells, a button to add a new user, and a counter of users.
• a simulation of calculating PI by generating random dots inside a circle. The simulator should include a slider to adjust the speed, a reset button, and the current estimate of PI.
• a simple app to compute your BMI, using form inputs for age, height and weight (in kilos)
• a whack-a-mole game but with spiders, a css 3-per-3 grid, emojis, and JS code
• a clone of asteroid using <canvas>, the mouse should orient the spaceship, it should fire bullets when clicking, and bullets can destroy asteroids.
• website for a company selling time travel visit packages (great pyramids, Trojan wars..). The website features 3 polaroid pictures taken by tourists of those eras

Non-working examples

Those examples don't work yet.. maybe one day in text-davinci-004 or 005?

• a 120 BPM drum machine made using tone.js, with a step sequencer made using html checkboxes, to indicate when to play. Each row should be a different instrument (kick, snare, hihat), 8 buttons per row. There is a button to start/stop.

FAQ

The UI/UX should be improved

I agree!

Uhh.. something went wrong

Try clicking again on generate 🎲

No I mean, something went REALLY wrong

Maybe you did too many requests to OpenAI?

I don't.. know?

Wait a bit then restart the application, eg. kill it from the terminal.

Message to hackers

After reworking on the app again in March 2024, I've noticed that there are now two new build options in Tauri: Android and iOS.

But ATM I haven't really looked into it.

If you are interested to explore this, here are the commands:

# init
bun run tauri android init
bun run tauri ios init

# run
bun run tauri android dev
bun run tauri ios dev