Cursor Playbook
Learned about nxtscape from HN today and interesting to see this cursor playbook emerging.
- Take an existing open source product with a huge marketplace/ecosystem
- cursor: vs code
- nxtscape: chrome
- Fork it
- Change some branding
- Stick some LLM hooks into it and fire up a sidepanel to chat.
- Profit.
The existing ecosystem is the key here, but Google does not want to lose browser market share. There are a hundred chrome forks that they don’t care about just like there were many vs code spins out in the world. Microsoft only started to pay attention once they started losing deals and developer mind-share to cursor.
Google already makes it pretty hard to fit into the existing ecosystem. For example running plain old Chromium works just fine when it comes to using extensions, but if you want to sync your profile and other things like that it starts to break apart a bit.
Unlike cursor, nxtscape is fully open source for now. I’m interested to follow this one along and see how it goes. Seems to be MacOS only at the moment.
Since this is a play on netscape, If a16z backs them it will complete the full circle and trigger the singularity.
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Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Doing less, for her
My daughter will be born soon, and I’m reflecting on what that means for my OpenSource work.
via Carlos Becker February 1, 2026The Browser’s Little White Lies
So I’m making a thing and I want it to be styled different if the link’s been visited. Rather than build something myself in JavaScript, I figure I’ll just hook into the browser’s mechanism for tracking if a link’s been visited (a sensible approach, if I d…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog February 1, 2026$29 million stolen from from Step Finance treasury wallets
The Solana-based defi portfolio tracker Step Finance lost 261,854 SOL (~$28.7 million) when a thief gained access to treasury and fee wallets. It's not yet clear how the attacker was able to steal the funds, although Step Finance…
via Web3 is Going Just Great February 1, 2026Generated by openring