I built an in-browser local AI assistant with some college friends (Ollama/LM Studio). Looking for honest feedback and testers

Hey everyone, A few classmates and I got tired of the usual browser AI workflow: copying text from a documentation page, opening a separate tab, pasting it into a chatbot, and switching back. We also didn't like the idea of sending internal code, homework, or private documents to third-party cloud APIs just to summarize an article or check an equation. So, as a learning project, we built a Chrome extension called Living Web. The core idea is simple: it sits in your browser sidebar and connects directly to your local Ollama or LM Studio instance over localhost:11434. Nothing leaves your computer. We've been running models like DeepSeek-R1 (8B/14B), Llama 3.3, and Qwen 2.5 on our laptops to test it. Actual features: ● Active tab reading: It reads the current page so you can ask questions directly about technical documentation, ArXiv preprints, news articles or youtube videos. ● Local document chat: You can drop PDF, CSV, TXT, or Markdown files into the sidebar and cross-reference them with the live page you have open. ● Table scraping: It pulls data from messy HTML tables and exports it directly to CSV or JSON. ● Basic browser actions: It can fill out web forms using details from a local profile note, click buttons, and help search for products on sites like Amazon (for example, finding specific specs or filtering through reviews). ● BYOK option: If you need a larger cloud model for a heavy task, you can plug in your own API key for Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini without paying a middleman subscription. Ollama setup: 1 .Ollama Installation · Download :Download Ollama · Verify : ollama --version · Pull a Model : ollama pull gemma3:4b ( Model is Your Wish ) Check ModelsRun : ollama run gemma3:4b 2. Download Living Web Extension : AI Chat with Ollama: Local AI, All LLM’s | Living Web - Chrome Web Store : First Comment · Its supports all Search engines Like : chrome , fire fox …etc 3. Open Living Web and select Ollama as the local provider An all-in-one AI switcher built right into the browser. The Living Web extension looks like a massive workflow upgrade if you regularly bounce between different AI models. It aggregates Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, Groq, Perplexity, OpenRouter, Sarvam, and even local Ollama setups in one clean menu. No more keeping ten different tabs open just to cross-reference responses. 4. Test a prompt How the automation works right now (and its limitations): To be completely transparent with you all: right now, page interaction is DOM-based. A content script scans the page, identifies input fields and buttons, and simulates standard browser events. It works reasonably well on standard forms, but on complex single-page apps (SPAs) with shadow DOMs or custom reactive components, it can still stumble. We know DOM scraping has a low ceiling. Because of that, our next release is focused on WebMCP (Web Model Context Protocol). Instead of guessing CSS selectors and simulating mouse clicks, the extension will connect directly to structured tools exposed by websites through navigator.modelContext. That should make page actions much faster, reliable, and lighter on token usage. A quick shoutout to the intelligence team at Global Agent Studio for mentoring us, answering our architectural questions, and helping us think through browser agent design while we built this. We're still engineering students and this is very much an active project for us. We would really appreciate it if you took it for a spin with your local setup. Break it, test weird models, check out the form-filling, and tell us where it falls short. I dropped the Chrome Web Store link in the comments below. If you test it out, please let us know what bugs you run into or what you'd like to see next. Thanks! submitted by /u/David_7036 [link] [comments]

Source: r/ollama | 2026-09-21