> Yesterday, OpenAI announced Atlas, its AI browser. To the surprise of literally nobody, it’s Chromium with AI slapped on top. Perplexity also has a browser: it’s called Comet, and it also is Chromium with AI slapped on top. Then we have DIA, which is, you guessed it, Chromium with AI slapped on top. I think Opera also has one of those Chromium browsers with AI slapped on top.
The interesting thing is what they "slap on top" of it then. In other words like a browser extension, how do they extend the browser? It's common to have a base model of something and then extend it with options of various capabilities. I don't really understand the complaint here.
The interesting thing to me about OpenAI's browser is how they will handle ad blockers. 95% of ChatGPT users use the free version and OpenAI needs to monetize that.
Building a chromium replacement is a daunting task. in fact microsoft gave up on thiers and adopted chromium for that reason. Chromium is an industry wide open source project like linux for good reason
I'd like a Chromium base model that I can add AI features to that I need. We have a mechanism for that called extensions, but I imagine there are features that require deeper integration with Chromium. We had a mechanism for that called ActiveX on IE and Netscape Plugins on other browsers but we got rid of that for security reasons.
We're at an interesting point in browser development and I'm excited about it
Building on top of a bunch of things works well, and is pretty much what Chromium itself is anyways. Building something "new" that is 99% the old thing so you can add your 1% is a different kind of building, and can't be lumped with the former by default. More powerful extensions is definitely the answer, just not one Google wants to allow.
The main problem with this is if browser A adds feature 1 and browser B adds feature 2 then you don't end up with "Chromium + 1 + 2" you end up with "Chromium + 1" or "Chromium + 2". Repeat for a couple dozen Chromium folks and your single extra feature doesn't look all that enticing anymore. The inverse way of looking at it is "if you're only adding 1% on top of Chromium, it's unlikely to amount to anything worth the average user switching for". Especially since Chrome is starting to push Gemeni natively anyways.
For these reasons, I think Chromium paint jobs are the least interesting thing to happen to browser development in a very very long time. Servo for embedded, Ladybird for "something different", and so on are much more interesting. These kinds of things, as you say, are more to the scale of what an individual browser extension used to be.
I've been very impressed by the open source Ladybird project for several years now. I wasn't up to date and didn't realize it had 8 full time engineers working on it now with project leader Andreas Kling. This is truely more promising than "slapping things on Chromium" and competing with Google Chrome.
I didn't explicity state but was implying that a new plug in archeticture to the open source Chromium project might be an interesting way to add AI features in a more democratic fashion.
Either path still has to compete with what Google does with proprietary extensions to Chrome.
Edit to be clear: Since Chromium is open source, the community could actually collaborate on adding a shared AI plugin architecture to the core project rather than making competing forks. That would solve the fragmentation problem entirely.
> Chromium is an industry wide open source project like linux for good reason
That "good" reason is thanks to Google's monopoly. Chromium is only technically opensource, it's still very much a Google project that's steered by them, ocassionally trying to sneak in anti-features like Web Environment Integrity, Manifest V3 etc.
> We're at an interesting point in browser development
Yes but that's only because of projects like LadyBird and Servo, but unfortunately they're still at a very early stage. The best we can do for web diversity is to boycott all Chromium-based browsers and support smaller projects like Ladybird and Servo (and use Gecko-based browsers in the interim).
> That "good" reason is thanks to Google's monopoly. Chromium is only technically opensource
That accusation is instantly disproven by the fact that the parent post literally cites 4 competitors that forked and extended it. Unless you can cite Google illegally shutting down attempts to produce a competing fork, your accusation has no basis. (If you can cite such a thing, I'd rather you bring them to court instead.)
It's trivial for any Tom, Dick and Harry to fork an opensource project and "extend" it - but none have so far actually extended the engine - have they implemented any new W3C standards or fixed any compliance bugs? Have they made any improvements to the rendering engine? I'm not aware of any of the forks doing anything significant, besides just superficial UI features and preventing merging certain pieces of code (like Manifest V3). If any of the forks have deviated in any significant way (like how Blink deviated from Webkit), please do enlighten me, because otherwise they're just copies dependent largely on Google for all the core improvements.
But is it though? Feels to me like Google just does whatever it wants. Nobody except Google wants manifest v3. Nobody wants "Web Environment Integrity", etc.
I agree that Google's control over the Chromium roadmap is a fundamental issue, making "industry-wide" a generous term. Brave (which I use) and other Chromium-forks exist to ensure the community does have its own branch. Brave disables WEI and forked the Manifest V2 code to ensure its built-in Shields and essential extensions (like uBlock Origin, which I also use) remain unaffected by Google's anti-user changes.
For the idea of NEW browser in the age of AI I expect from browser different Rendering of the website rather than moving cursor on the screen.
Like what Wolfram Alpha does when adjusting the output view based on the type of the content queried.
And basic functionality of the browser
Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine?
The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform.
The incentive for anyone building a browser is to use the platform that gives you the best web compat especially at the outset when you don’t have enough users of your app to be able to make big changes to the platform. Even Chrome didn’t start from scratch - it used WebKit!
The Chromium community has built an excellent open platform that everyone can use. We are fortunate to be able to use it.
> trusted with big, critical open source projects.
You talk as if the community has appointed Google to take care of these projects. Google is spending $$$ writing code and open sourcing it. Not the other way around.
And as with anything open source, if you dont like the direction of open source code - fork it.
If I have an open source project, you dont say 'bitpush cant be trusted with the project'.
The Play Store services are not a critical open source project, though. The AOSP is still intact and maintained in accordance with the licensing.
The application signing backtrack is an issue, but more of a political problem than a technical one. America's lesson here has been written on the wall for years: regulate your tech businesses, or your tech businesses will regulate you.
> Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine?
It should be fast when rendering HTML/CSS. I don't really care about JavaScript performance, because where possible I switch it off anyways.
It should be customizable and configurable, more than Firefox was before Electrolysis and certainly much more than Chrome.
It should support addons that can change, override, mangle, basically do everything imaginable to site content. But with configurable permissions per site.
It should support saving the current state of a website including the exact rendering at that moment for archiving. It should also support annotations (like comments, emphasis, corrections) for that. And it should support diffs for those saved states.
And if you include "the browser" in that:
I want a properly usable bookmarks manager, not the crap that current browsers have. Every bookmark should include (optionally, but easily) the exact page state at the time of bookmarking. Same for history.
Sync everything to a configurable git repo: config, bookmarks, history, open windows/tabs, annotations and saved website snapshots.
I want easily usable mass operations, like "save me every PDF from this tab group", "save all the pictures and name them sometopic-somewebsite-date-id.jpg" or "print all tabs that started with this search and all sites visited from there as PDF printouts into the documentation folder".
I want the ability to watch a website for changes, so the browser visits in the background and notifies me if anything relevant is different (this could be a really hard thing to get right I guess...).
I want "network perspectives" (for lack of a better word): show me this website as it would look from my local address, over this VPN, with my language set to Portuguese, ..., easily switchable per tab.
I want completely configurable keybindings for everything, like vimperator, but also for the bookmark manager, settings, really everything.
I think the concerns are not about feature requests but about leveraging embrace-extend-extinguish dynamics to push the web as a whole closer to being locked into dependence on Google as a platform. There are mountains of articles on the topic, ranging from ad blockers to privacy to DRM. But the critiques are old news to anyone who's been following the topic for a while.
> The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform.
I'd prefer something that's not crazy complex, that's not "an entire app platform" designed and implemented by Google. Google essentially controls the W3C (Mozilla would vanish if Google stopped funding it), and controls the monopoly rendering engine.
Half of websites are better without JavaScript and web fonts, and 99% are just text, images, and videos with maybe a few simple controls. For the other 1% I can fire up Google Chrome and suffer the whole platform.
I want a web rendering engine for the 1%, that does the simple stuff quickly and isn't a giant attack surface around 30 years of technical debt and unwanted features calling itself an "application platform."
I too have nostalgia for a time when prices were reasonable, politicians didn't philander and children respected their elders.
And yet here we are :-)
For what it's worth, despite it being /en vogue/ to rag on Google, the Chrome team has some of the most talented and dedicated folks focused on building a vibrant and interesting web for most people in the world.
I'm glad this point is continuing to get hammered home. Because on what feels like a nearly daily basis, I'm still seeing people surprised and learning for the first time that what they think of as a whole browser ecosystem is really just a bunch of things using a Chromium foundation.
But to try and be constructive for whoever's reading and thinking of their next AI browser, I would be impressed by a wholly alternative browser engine, or demonstrations of major capacity to maintain programming upkeep of alternatives on par with the programming capacity supporting Chromium. A big part of the Chromium "moat" as it exists right now is the ability to bring disproportionate resources to bear on browser engine modernization. I would be impressed if AI tools were being used to demonstrably close the gap, because it conceivably could have important implications for getting us away from the browser monopoly problem.
To be sure, a browser that retains a representation of every word you read on it, constantly synthesizing a profile on your preferences, using that profile to filter everything you see through a lens that consistently enforces and limits the worldview of a snapshot-of-you - all with a level of data retention that would be controversial for Google but that OpenAI's users will happily opt into, that Palantir and its government clients are likely salivating over, and that is fertile ground for a new generation of ads that bypass pesky things like third-party cookie restrictions - must be exciting to many!
Another possible aspect of it is that probably more and more sites are blocking AI crawlers through e.g. Cloudflare's support for blocking AI crawler and AI agents. This will give them a backdoor to that content through a user's connection.
I am not sure if this is happening, but as blocking becomes more prevalent, having a widely-used browser will help.
"Oops, we got caught using our customers' internet connections as exit nodes for the largest residential proxy ever to exist, both on pages they visited and ones that they didn't. But don't worry, this was an unauthorized experimental rollout to only parts of the world that we don't have legal nexus in. The program has been halted, and the person responsible has been sacked. Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti..."
It can (and likely will) just transmit standard browser signals. The AI integration is more of a UI layer on top, not something that is being sent in a request header UA string.
That lack of signals in addition to the regular human behavior patterns that something like Puppeteer doesn't have is going to make this practically impossible to block
Man, I miss the old days, seeing new tech come out and not immediately wondering how the worst parts of our industry are going to turn it into the torment nexus.
Google is launched and it is web directories but…better. It takes a decade to become a monolithic ad-tech company but all is not lost yet, until it becomes the face of enshittification of the entire internet another decade on.
Facebook is launched and it’s this cool way to keep in touch with your friends until that too becomes a monolithic ad-tech company a decade later, and soon after becomes the face of enshittification of social media as a whole, lowering the bar on civility to a subterranean level.
Ditto for Amazon and the enshittification of online retail. And Microsoft with.. whatever the hell you call Windows these days.
What took 10, 20, even 30 years to show up as being bad for society now takes just a couple of years, maybe even less than that. Maybe even straight away.
It’s like the stagnation of Asimov’s Galactic Empire. A bunch of crusty old tech companies, too big to change.
So much modern tech is just about capture and extraction, not actually empowering the end user. It's as if guitar companies found a way to make more money in claiming royalties on musicians' work instead of building good guitars.
I would amend that to basically all modern tech. It's all fucking rent seeking now. Everyone wants to be the next Google and Facebook (or to be acquired by them) and just sit on their asses and cash checks while occasionally rebooting a server.
Every tech company is headed by MBA graduates who couldn't read code if their lives depended on it and all they know how to do is order engineers to make the UX worse so they can make imaginary lines go up. I am so, so terrified of what happens to Steam when Gabe Newell retires/dies.
I feel the same way, except Facebook had its mask off right from the start. Its precursor was a site that used Zuckerberg's female classmates' photos without permission to rate their attractiveness.
Zuckerberg is also famous for calling Facebook users "dumb f**s" back in the early days of Facebook for entrusting him with all sorts of information.
I think the point is: why is OpenAI wasting its time on this? If it's just another channel for billing tokens then OK I guess, but it's not like it's a huge breakthrough.
OpenAI should be the roads, not the trucks. Let other product teams sort out the AI browsers. OpenAI has lots of problems to solve related to models and thats where they should focus. This is a side quest.
Zen is an incredibly thin layer on top of Firefox, with some rather glaring performance and battery life issues. Battery life in particular was already not one of Firefox's strong suits. It looks nice, there's some interesting and useful ideas there, but Zen is ultimately "just Firefox" the same way that all of these AI browsers are "just Chromium." Ladybird's the only new kid on the block for a decade.
First, Chromium is also based on WebKit so that means really only one browser engine.
Second, I imagine so many web sites and web applications have, knowingly or unknowingly, made themselves dependent on WebKit or Chromium specific behavior, it's almost impossible to write a new browser compatible with all (or even most) of the web.
This could be a legal loophole to scrape all the data from websites that block you directly. Your users will grab all the data for themselves and you just put some telemetry here and there and here we go, we scrape all the web without even using our own IPs
That's exactly what i think it is. Have a legion of users willingly scraping the internet for you, going behind captchas, logins, and all the mechanisms that was put there to stop bots. With this every user user of the browser is also a bot. Now i wonder if the agent string will be something unique, and certain places will just block those browsers from their websites by it.
To find out what someone truly believes, don't listen to what they say, observe how they act. I don't see how OpenAI's recent actions make any sense from the perspective a company that internally believes it's actually close to unlocking super-intelligence.
I'd go a step further: has OpenAI actually achieved any significant research breakthroughs on par with Google's transformers? So why does everybody think they will achieve the next N breakthroughs necessary to get to AGI?
Google invented transformers. OpenAI just released their model to the public first. Good for them, but not exactly impressive research.
Reasoning models are pretty cool, but it was just taking what every body was already doing manually ("and please show your work") and making it automatic. The whole agentic shift is also nice but kinda obvious. But I'm still struggling with hallucinations and context rot all the time and it's becoming increasingly clear that that's not something that can be solved incrementally. We need more architectural breakthroughs like the transformer to achieve something like real AGI. Possibly several more.
They're spinning up their own advertising platform; chatgpt is a coherent contender to google's search bar, over a long enough time span if they can maintain user engagement numbers, it seems plausible that they could secure half of google's ad revenue. Spinning up a browser is not cheap but it certainly lines up with their actions of spinning up a perpetual advertising machine via chatgpt to fund other things. Which might include AGI if/when that happens.
>a company that internally believes it's actually close to unlocking super-intelligence
I am not sure if this is still true, they started backing off from this line of reasoning summer of 2024 and haven't returned to it.
No, but their actions do suggest they think they're nearing a disruption to both browser and web page: a new way to acquire and make use of information.
OpenAI has always had the stance of “commercialize narrow AI that is research aligned with AGI development”. In fact they used to ask this as an interview question — “should we commercialize narrow AI or aim to put all resources into AGI”. The correct answer required you to prove you drank the kool aid and also wanted to make tons of money.
Makes sense, I guess. Did you hear that question yourself in an interview, hear it from someone who interviewed, or hear that as a story through the grapevine? and ~when was it asked?
They are multiple companies in-one. One that is pushing for AGI, model development, one that is trying to build consumer apps and "win" AI applications/platform moat.
This post resurfaced a thought I had. MSFT is really, really pushing AI. It would be really cool if someone attempted, with any of the coding models / agents, to recreate Windows from "scratch". THAT would be very interesting, and useful -- on my levels.
Agree with the other comments that it's not fundamentally innovative and no one with a sense of privacy wants to ship all browsing data to one of the mega-AIs.
BUT -- that's missing the strategic point here:
- Everyone realizes that being the gatekeeper for user interaction is key: that's where all the context is and utility will come from
- AI is providing a unique opportunity to overturn a long-held monopoly (Chrome's dominance) by providing
Put another way, ChatGPT + Chromium = OpenAI's Trojan horse.
It would be foolish for them to waste resources innovating on the browser engine (which isn't their core competency) when they can use their actual competency (AI) to take their bet at capturing the market
So how are these browsers treating captchas. Are they waiting for human intervention like chatgpt agent mode? they must be right? but then its almost useless
It seems like for better or worse if you want to be a web company, there's a lot of incentive to try and become a platform. A limitation for the likes of Zoom, Dropbox, Proton, and seemingly OpenAI is they have to struggle to integrate with calendars, office suites, and even the browser itself. And it may be turning out to be true that it's more feasible to simply invent your own parallel ecosystem of benefits and office suites and online storage drives than to attempt to negotiate with the gatekeepers of existing ones.
I would like to think that the "real" solution is strong web protocols and interoperability, And perhaps even something like an explicit anti-platform ethos. As it stands it seems like the strategy of being a platform is to outrace protocols in terms of offering new capabilities. But it would at least be nice if protocols are close enough behind that they're effectively a "safety net", or the equivalent of generic drugs, that everyone can fall back to.
Is this true? Most of mine is in a text editor. In a previous role, it was in Excel. My partner spends her day in Power BI, etc etc. Are we outliers? What jobs are mostly in browsers instead of task-oriented specific other software tools?
Sales (CRMs are all in browser now), Marketing (entire stack, include some creative (Canva) is in browser now), Strategy is half in powerpoint/xls (creating content) and half in browser (researching info), HR (Workday, LinkedIn, etc.), product (Figma, Miro, Aha!, Linear), support (Asana/Jira) probably spend at least 50% of their working time in browser. Also the time people are at their desk but not working, is usually in browser (check news, stocks, blogs, personal email, etc.)
Okay if author so ignorant and doesn't even see difference and just genuinely hates this topic why even make an article? "Look see this new things someone else exited about, I don't give a damn about it so much that I'll write post about that, I'll even completely ignore figuring out what's different about it myself and just spew some surface level ignorant overview"
It's interesting that no one in this thread seems to use ChatGPT particularly deeply to understand why this is useful. I think this is very interesting, I don't particularly love Chrome, so a version of Chrome that more deeply integrates with one of the most common things I do in my browser (use ChatGPT) is very interesting!
1) a browser contains all the information marketing firms and companies kill for. The buying habits of billions of people, hell it contains more than that: it contains all sorts of data about what exactly makes people buy.
2) OpenAI's browser generates excitement and might actually make this information available for OpenAI to sell
3) This would be a totally new revenue stream for OpenAI, maybe a dozen new revenue streams
No one does this. For example all the major browsers reach out to an existing library to implement rendering for fonts. There is so mich complexity and already a solution to solve the problems and allow you to focus on something more important. There are benefits in standardizing on a single thing and having everyone working to improveia common base. Considering the actual rendering and functionality of the web is standardized the most exciting features kf a browser will be outside of the browser engine.
>To the surprise of literally nobody, it’s Chromium with AI slapped on top
We should start calling browsers "Chromiums."
My favorite Chromium is Vivaldi, by the way. It doesn't have AI slapped on it, but it has native a RSS client, e-mail client, vertical tabs, notes, a way to separate tabs into "workspaces" and a way to save tabs into "sessions" that you can reopen later, and it native profiles like Chrome. There are also countless settings you can customize (and lots of terrible defaults that you will want to customize, like rocker gestures). It's pretty much Opera 2.0 without the crypto. These features feel to me far more useful than AI.
To every billionaire in America right now who can read this...
I haven't used any of the AI stuff that's been released so far. It doesn't appear to have affected my day to day in any manner but I'm not particularly connected in the first place I suppose.
But this browser, with the AI on the top of it? I haven't used it yet. But it sounds life changing. I'll be surprised if I have a job in three weeks now that this is out. And coming off that Sora drop? DAMN! Haven't used that either but I heard it's a really expensive tic tac that gets boring after 10 minutes.
Anyways, please give all your money to Sam Altman. He needs 7 trillion dollars. And with results like these, the path forward must be paved with gold. So pour, all of your money, right into this one, please.
umm, I am not a fan of any of the recent new browsers but what's wrong with Chromium in itself? I think Chromium is pretty good, technologically mature, foss.
Chromium is highly dependent on Google’s interests. We see how they chose to implement Manifest V3 in a way that, through a strange coincidence(/s), neuters the capabilities of Ad Blocking extensions.
All downstream browsers are affected by Google’s bottom line. Putting lipstick and a few nice features on top of an engine that you don’t control doesn’t make your browser a true alternative from Google’s.
TLDR: yet another blogger demonstrating a complete lack of intellectual curiosity by completely dismissing an idea instead of exploring its potential.
There is a lot to discuss about a browser that has an LLM with local, personalized memory and follows and assists you on every interaction. But ”this is just chromium with AI on top” is a lazy take
That's subjective. I don't consider Chromium retrofitted with Chat-GPT newsworthy. Some people might. I also don't fault the commenter for being tired of the majority of content on this site being LLM-adjacent. I'm certainly over it.
Why would they build their own browser from scratch? That would be dumb without a significantly compelling reason. The author of this post reminds me of one of those guys who writes an entirely new game engine instead of using an off the shelf product and ends up never completing the game..
Good grief. Developers who use Unity/Unreal/Game Maker/ whatever don’t announce their game as being a revolutionary new tech.
The problem isn’t that they made yet another chromium based browser with their garbage on top. The problem is that they’re positioning it as this exciting and radical new thing when it’s just chromium with their garbage on top.
Because people are tired of seeing LLMs, which aren't even good at the things they are claimed to be good at, shoehorned into everything whether or not it provides a shred of value to the user.
> Yesterday, OpenAI announced Atlas, its AI browser. To the surprise of literally nobody, it’s Chromium with AI slapped on top. Perplexity also has a browser: it’s called Comet, and it also is Chromium with AI slapped on top. Then we have DIA, which is, you guessed it, Chromium with AI slapped on top. I think Opera also has one of those Chromium browsers with AI slapped on top.
The interesting thing is what they "slap on top" of it then. In other words like a browser extension, how do they extend the browser? It's common to have a base model of something and then extend it with options of various capabilities. I don't really understand the complaint here.
The interesting thing to me about OpenAI's browser is how they will handle ad blockers. 95% of ChatGPT users use the free version and OpenAI needs to monetize that.
Building a chromium replacement is a daunting task. in fact microsoft gave up on thiers and adopted chromium for that reason. Chromium is an industry wide open source project like linux for good reason
I'd like a Chromium base model that I can add AI features to that I need. We have a mechanism for that called extensions, but I imagine there are features that require deeper integration with Chromium. We had a mechanism for that called ActiveX on IE and Netscape Plugins on other browsers but we got rid of that for security reasons.
We're at an interesting point in browser development and I'm excited about it
Building on top of a bunch of things works well, and is pretty much what Chromium itself is anyways. Building something "new" that is 99% the old thing so you can add your 1% is a different kind of building, and can't be lumped with the former by default. More powerful extensions is definitely the answer, just not one Google wants to allow.
The main problem with this is if browser A adds feature 1 and browser B adds feature 2 then you don't end up with "Chromium + 1 + 2" you end up with "Chromium + 1" or "Chromium + 2". Repeat for a couple dozen Chromium folks and your single extra feature doesn't look all that enticing anymore. The inverse way of looking at it is "if you're only adding 1% on top of Chromium, it's unlikely to amount to anything worth the average user switching for". Especially since Chrome is starting to push Gemeni natively anyways.
For these reasons, I think Chromium paint jobs are the least interesting thing to happen to browser development in a very very long time. Servo for embedded, Ladybird for "something different", and so on are much more interesting. These kinds of things, as you say, are more to the scale of what an individual browser extension used to be.
I've been very impressed by the open source Ladybird project for several years now. I wasn't up to date and didn't realize it had 8 full time engineers working on it now with project leader Andreas Kling. This is truely more promising than "slapping things on Chromium" and competing with Google Chrome.
I didn't explicity state but was implying that a new plug in archeticture to the open source Chromium project might be an interesting way to add AI features in a more democratic fashion.
Either path still has to compete with what Google does with proprietary extensions to Chrome.
Edit to be clear: Since Chromium is open source, the community could actually collaborate on adding a shared AI plugin architecture to the core project rather than making competing forks. That would solve the fragmentation problem entirely.
> Chromium is an industry wide open source project like linux for good reason
That "good" reason is thanks to Google's monopoly. Chromium is only technically opensource, it's still very much a Google project that's steered by them, ocassionally trying to sneak in anti-features like Web Environment Integrity, Manifest V3 etc.
> We're at an interesting point in browser development
Yes but that's only because of projects like LadyBird and Servo, but unfortunately they're still at a very early stage. The best we can do for web diversity is to boycott all Chromium-based browsers and support smaller projects like Ladybird and Servo (and use Gecko-based browsers in the interim).
> That "good" reason is thanks to Google's monopoly. Chromium is only technically opensource
That accusation is instantly disproven by the fact that the parent post literally cites 4 competitors that forked and extended it. Unless you can cite Google illegally shutting down attempts to produce a competing fork, your accusation has no basis. (If you can cite such a thing, I'd rather you bring them to court instead.)
It's trivial for any Tom, Dick and Harry to fork an opensource project and "extend" it - but none have so far actually extended the engine - have they implemented any new W3C standards or fixed any compliance bugs? Have they made any improvements to the rendering engine? I'm not aware of any of the forks doing anything significant, besides just superficial UI features and preventing merging certain pieces of code (like Manifest V3). If any of the forks have deviated in any significant way (like how Blink deviated from Webkit), please do enlighten me, because otherwise they're just copies dependent largely on Google for all the core improvements.
The bothering part is the browser factor form. Why not just an extension?
Wasn't that covered in the comment you're replying to
>Chromium is an industry wide[...]
But is it though? Feels to me like Google just does whatever it wants. Nobody except Google wants manifest v3. Nobody wants "Web Environment Integrity", etc.
I agree that Google's control over the Chromium roadmap is a fundamental issue, making "industry-wide" a generous term. Brave (which I use) and other Chromium-forks exist to ensure the community does have its own branch. Brave disables WEI and forked the Manifest V2 code to ensure its built-in Shields and essential extensions (like uBlock Origin, which I also use) remain unaffected by Google's anti-user changes.
For the idea of NEW browser in the age of AI I expect from browser different Rendering of the website rather than moving cursor on the screen. Like what Wolfram Alpha does when adjusting the output view based on the type of the content queried. And basic functionality of the browser
Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine?
The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform.
The incentive for anyone building a browser is to use the platform that gives you the best web compat especially at the outset when you don’t have enough users of your app to be able to make big changes to the platform. Even Chrome didn’t start from scratch - it used WebKit!
The Chromium community has built an excellent open platform that everyone can use. We are fortunate to be able to use it.
I think Google has proven with their recent actions concerning android that they really can't be trusted with big, critical open source projects.
> trusted with big, critical open source projects.
You talk as if the community has appointed Google to take care of these projects. Google is spending $$$ writing code and open sourcing it. Not the other way around.
And as with anything open source, if you dont like the direction of open source code - fork it.
If I have an open source project, you dont say 'bitpush cant be trusted with the project'.
The Play Store services are not a critical open source project, though. The AOSP is still intact and maintained in accordance with the licensing.
The application signing backtrack is an issue, but more of a political problem than a technical one. America's lesson here has been written on the wall for years: regulate your tech businesses, or your tech businesses will regulate you.
Where is the source code for AOSP 16 QPR1?
Where are the security patches of the past couple of months?
What is QPR?
> Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine?
It should be fast when rendering HTML/CSS. I don't really care about JavaScript performance, because where possible I switch it off anyways.
It should be customizable and configurable, more than Firefox was before Electrolysis and certainly much more than Chrome.
It should support addons that can change, override, mangle, basically do everything imaginable to site content. But with configurable permissions per site.
It should support saving the current state of a website including the exact rendering at that moment for archiving. It should also support annotations (like comments, emphasis, corrections) for that. And it should support diffs for those saved states.
And if you include "the browser" in that:
I want a properly usable bookmarks manager, not the crap that current browsers have. Every bookmark should include (optionally, but easily) the exact page state at the time of bookmarking. Same for history.
Sync everything to a configurable git repo: config, bookmarks, history, open windows/tabs, annotations and saved website snapshots.
I want easily usable mass operations, like "save me every PDF from this tab group", "save all the pictures and name them sometopic-somewebsite-date-id.jpg" or "print all tabs that started with this search and all sites visited from there as PDF printouts into the documentation folder".
I want the ability to watch a website for changes, so the browser visits in the background and notifies me if anything relevant is different (this could be a really hard thing to get right I guess...).
I want "network perspectives" (for lack of a better word): show me this website as it would look from my local address, over this VPN, with my language set to Portuguese, ..., easily switchable per tab.
I want completely configurable keybindings for everything, like vimperator, but also for the bookmark manager, settings, really everything.
And I want a pony ;)
> I don't really care about JavaScript performance, because where possible I switch it off anyways.
your needs are not the majority's and you know it
I think the concerns are not about feature requests but about leveraging embrace-extend-extinguish dynamics to push the web as a whole closer to being locked into dependence on Google as a platform. There are mountains of articles on the topic, ranging from ad blockers to privacy to DRM. But the critiques are old news to anyone who's been following the topic for a while.
I'd like to see browsers support the Gemini protocol and the Gemtext format.
> The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform.
I'd prefer something that's not crazy complex, that's not "an entire app platform" designed and implemented by Google. Google essentially controls the W3C (Mozilla would vanish if Google stopped funding it), and controls the monopoly rendering engine.
Half of websites are better without JavaScript and web fonts, and 99% are just text, images, and videos with maybe a few simple controls. For the other 1% I can fire up Google Chrome and suffer the whole platform.
I want a web rendering engine for the 1%, that does the simple stuff quickly and isn't a giant attack surface around 30 years of technical debt and unwanted features calling itself an "application platform."
I too have nostalgia for a time when prices were reasonable, politicians didn't philander and children respected their elders.
And yet here we are :-)
For what it's worth, despite it being /en vogue/ to rag on Google, the Chrome team has some of the most talented and dedicated folks focused on building a vibrant and interesting web for most people in the world.
Full support for Ublock Origin. Perhaps at the native level rather than as an extension.
A ublock origin browser?
I would like scratch made browser to focus on performance.
Chromium browsers eat my RAM and drain my computer battery.
Try Safari. No browser is snappier or more power efficient.
I'm glad this point is continuing to get hammered home. Because on what feels like a nearly daily basis, I'm still seeing people surprised and learning for the first time that what they think of as a whole browser ecosystem is really just a bunch of things using a Chromium foundation.
But to try and be constructive for whoever's reading and thinking of their next AI browser, I would be impressed by a wholly alternative browser engine, or demonstrations of major capacity to maintain programming upkeep of alternatives on par with the programming capacity supporting Chromium. A big part of the Chromium "moat" as it exists right now is the ability to bring disproportionate resources to bear on browser engine modernization. I would be impressed if AI tools were being used to demonstrably close the gap, because it conceivably could have important implications for getting us away from the browser monopoly problem.
Its not "AI slapped on top" but AI slopped on top.
I will use an "AI browser" over my dead body.
Presumably the "I" in this scenario is your AI replacement, since you're dead in this scenario?
until your company rolls it out
Please don't give the pointy-haired boss ideas.
To be sure, a browser that retains a representation of every word you read on it, constantly synthesizing a profile on your preferences, using that profile to filter everything you see through a lens that consistently enforces and limits the worldview of a snapshot-of-you - all with a level of data retention that would be controversial for Google but that OpenAI's users will happily opt into, that Palantir and its government clients are likely salivating over, and that is fertile ground for a new generation of ads that bypass pesky things like third-party cookie restrictions - must be exciting to many!
It's just not exciting to me.
Another possible aspect of it is that probably more and more sites are blocking AI crawlers through e.g. Cloudflare's support for blocking AI crawler and AI agents. This will give them a backdoor to that content through a user's connection.
I am not sure if this is happening, but as blocking becomes more prevalent, having a widely-used browser will help.
I can just see the news story now:
"Oops, we got caught using our customers' internet connections as exit nodes for the largest residential proxy ever to exist, both on pages they visited and ones that they didn't. But don't worry, this was an unauthorized experimental rollout to only parts of the world that we don't have legal nexus in. The program has been halted, and the person responsible has been sacked. Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti..."
What's the user agent?
We can redirect those users to horrible content. One of those blinking gif websites with loud midi music or something.
Edit: it reuses popular browser user agents and is indistinguishable. They know what they're doing.
Why won't these sites simply block this browser?
It can (and likely will) just transmit standard browser signals. The AI integration is more of a UI layer on top, not something that is being sent in a request header UA string.
That lack of signals in addition to the regular human behavior patterns that something like Puppeteer doesn't have is going to make this practically impossible to block
Because this browser is just chromium and its user agent will be indistinguishable
Bots can report such user agents too, so that's not the reason.
The reason is that it's easier to block bot hosting providers. That's why illegal botnets rely on compromised personal machines.
I downloaded it to see if Anubis can block it. It lies and claims to be Google Chrome.
If such a browser was unavoidable I'd just drop off the web and read books. They can only turn the screws so much.
I hear Ray Bradbury is a pretty good novelist.
Man, I miss the old days, seeing new tech come out and not immediately wondering how the worst parts of our industry are going to turn it into the torment nexus.
I remember the optimism:
Google is launched and it is web directories but…better. It takes a decade to become a monolithic ad-tech company but all is not lost yet, until it becomes the face of enshittification of the entire internet another decade on.
Facebook is launched and it’s this cool way to keep in touch with your friends until that too becomes a monolithic ad-tech company a decade later, and soon after becomes the face of enshittification of social media as a whole, lowering the bar on civility to a subterranean level.
Ditto for Amazon and the enshittification of online retail. And Microsoft with.. whatever the hell you call Windows these days.
What took 10, 20, even 30 years to show up as being bad for society now takes just a couple of years, maybe even less than that. Maybe even straight away.
It’s like the stagnation of Asimov’s Galactic Empire. A bunch of crusty old tech companies, too big to change.
So much modern tech is just about capture and extraction, not actually empowering the end user. It's as if guitar companies found a way to make more money in claiming royalties on musicians' work instead of building good guitars.
I would amend that to basically all modern tech. It's all fucking rent seeking now. Everyone wants to be the next Google and Facebook (or to be acquired by them) and just sit on their asses and cash checks while occasionally rebooting a server.
Every tech company is headed by MBA graduates who couldn't read code if their lives depended on it and all they know how to do is order engineers to make the UX worse so they can make imaginary lines go up. I am so, so terrified of what happens to Steam when Gabe Newell retires/dies.
I feel the same way, except Facebook had its mask off right from the start. Its precursor was a site that used Zuckerberg's female classmates' photos without permission to rate their attractiveness.
Zuckerberg is also famous for calling Facebook users "dumb f**s" back in the early days of Facebook for entrusting him with all sorts of information.
https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
I do too. Those days are gone. The profit motive makes everything - even cool things - feel adversarial to me.
Rolling your own browser is 10x more dangerous than rolling your own auth or crypto. Building on top of chromium is a good thing here.
I think the point is: why is OpenAI wasting its time on this? If it's just another channel for billing tokens then OK I guess, but it's not like it's a huge breakthrough.
OpenAI should be the roads, not the trucks. Let other product teams sort out the AI browsers. OpenAI has lots of problems to solve related to models and thats where they should focus. This is a side quest.
It’s good for collecting a lot of computer use trajectory data
Because the models are stagnating.
This weird solution of storing representations, and not the actual events/data can't age well.
Like flying a plane but instead of logging flight data digitally, you film the cockpit gauges with a camcorder.
So, Atlas, Comet, Edge, Dia, Brave, Opera, etc are all Chromium.
And any browser on iOS uses the safari engine under the hood?
Looks like we are down to two browsers.
>any browser on iOS uses the safari engine under the hood?
Literally every browser on iOS. Up until iOS 17.4 you were not even allowed to have alternative browser engine. And that still holds true outside EU.
https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
I use Orion as my daily driver, mostly because of its Kagi integration.
Firefox still exists.
firefox is the best, and gemini in google search results is enough, for me.
There's Orion. It's not bad, but I don't love it either.
Zen is a really nice Firefox fork.
Ladybird is coming along.
Zen is an incredibly thin layer on top of Firefox, with some rather glaring performance and battery life issues. Battery life in particular was already not one of Firefox's strong suits. It looks nice, there's some interesting and useful ideas there, but Zen is ultimately "just Firefox" the same way that all of these AI browsers are "just Chromium." Ladybird's the only new kid on the block for a decade.
First, Chromium is also based on WebKit so that means really only one browser engine.
Second, I imagine so many web sites and web applications have, knowingly or unknowingly, made themselves dependent on WebKit or Chromium specific behavior, it's almost impossible to write a new browser compatible with all (or even most) of the web.
Chromium is Blink and whatever common ancestor they share has diverged much over the past decade
This could be a legal loophole to scrape all the data from websites that block you directly. Your users will grab all the data for themselves and you just put some telemetry here and there and here we go, we scrape all the web without even using our own IPs
That's exactly what i think it is. Have a legion of users willingly scraping the internet for you, going behind captchas, logins, and all the mechanisms that was put there to stop bots. With this every user user of the browser is also a bot. Now i wonder if the agent string will be something unique, and certain places will just block those browsers from their websites by it.
I guess if you ask ChatGPT to build a browser for you, this is what you get.
Nah.. I'm good. I use brave for daily use and that's it. My family uses safari by default and won't switch over since they're not tech savvy.
Can easily bypass captcha when your human confirms it for you.
Naturally based on Chrome, fot the Chrome OS Platform, formerly known as Web.
To find out what someone truly believes, don't listen to what they say, observe how they act. I don't see how OpenAI's recent actions make any sense from the perspective a company that internally believes it's actually close to unlocking super-intelligence.
I'd go a step further: has OpenAI actually achieved any significant research breakthroughs on par with Google's transformers? So why does everybody think they will achieve the next N breakthroughs necessary to get to AGI?
They basically invented LLMs as we know them (autoregressive transformers trained on web data) with the GPT 1/2/3 series of papers.
They also pioneered reasoning models, which are probably the biggest breakthrough since GPT-3 on the AGI tech tree.
Google invented transformers. OpenAI just released their model to the public first. Good for them, but not exactly impressive research.
Reasoning models are pretty cool, but it was just taking what every body was already doing manually ("and please show your work") and making it automatic. The whole agentic shift is also nice but kinda obvious. But I'm still struggling with hallucinations and context rot all the time and it's becoming increasingly clear that that's not something that can be solved incrementally. We need more architectural breakthroughs like the transformer to achieve something like real AGI. Possibly several more.
They're spinning up their own advertising platform; chatgpt is a coherent contender to google's search bar, over a long enough time span if they can maintain user engagement numbers, it seems plausible that they could secure half of google's ad revenue. Spinning up a browser is not cheap but it certainly lines up with their actions of spinning up a perpetual advertising machine via chatgpt to fund other things. Which might include AGI if/when that happens.
>a company that internally believes it's actually close to unlocking super-intelligence
I am not sure if this is still true, they started backing off from this line of reasoning summer of 2024 and haven't returned to it.
I think they need to respond to all the funds they've raised and need to generate money somehow beyond subscriptions.
No, but their actions do suggest they think they're nearing a disruption to both browser and web page: a new way to acquire and make use of information.
Like an information OS for the information cloud.
I suspect that this will always be just one more year away like Tesla's robotaxis
OpenAI has always had the stance of “commercialize narrow AI that is research aligned with AGI development”. In fact they used to ask this as an interview question — “should we commercialize narrow AI or aim to put all resources into AGI”. The correct answer required you to prove you drank the kool aid and also wanted to make tons of money.
Makes sense, I guess. Did you hear that question yourself in an interview, hear it from someone who interviewed, or hear that as a story through the grapevine? and ~when was it asked?
Is there a correct answer?
Commercializing something gives you more resources to do the thing you really want to do.
Anthropic came to the same conclusion. SSI either doesn't have something commercializable or came to a different conclusion.
They are multiple companies in-one. One that is pushing for AGI, model development, one that is trying to build consumer apps and "win" AI applications/platform moat.
This post resurfaced a thought I had. MSFT is really, really pushing AI. It would be really cool if someone attempted, with any of the coding models / agents, to recreate Windows from "scratch". THAT would be very interesting, and useful -- on my levels.
Agree with the other comments that it's not fundamentally innovative and no one with a sense of privacy wants to ship all browsing data to one of the mega-AIs.
BUT -- that's missing the strategic point here:
- Everyone realizes that being the gatekeeper for user interaction is key: that's where all the context is and utility will come from
- AI is providing a unique opportunity to overturn a long-held monopoly (Chrome's dominance) by providing
Put another way, ChatGPT + Chromium = OpenAI's Trojan horse.
It would be foolish for them to waste resources innovating on the browser engine (which isn't their core competency) when they can use their actual competency (AI) to take their bet at capturing the market
So how are these browsers treating captchas. Are they waiting for human intervention like chatgpt agent mode? they must be right? but then its almost useless
These all envy Edge and Chrome for having nice AI integration built-in. But the last thing we need is a bunch of "new" browsers!
Most of what most people do, who sit 8h a day in front of a computer, is in the browser. So I see where this product idea is coming from...
It seems like for better or worse if you want to be a web company, there's a lot of incentive to try and become a platform. A limitation for the likes of Zoom, Dropbox, Proton, and seemingly OpenAI is they have to struggle to integrate with calendars, office suites, and even the browser itself. And it may be turning out to be true that it's more feasible to simply invent your own parallel ecosystem of benefits and office suites and online storage drives than to attempt to negotiate with the gatekeepers of existing ones.
I would like to think that the "real" solution is strong web protocols and interoperability, And perhaps even something like an explicit anti-platform ethos. As it stands it seems like the strategy of being a platform is to outrace protocols in terms of offering new capabilities. But it would at least be nice if protocols are close enough behind that they're effectively a "safety net", or the equivalent of generic drugs, that everyone can fall back to.
Building a successful platform has always been the winning move from the beginning of the computer industry.
Is this true? Most of mine is in a text editor. In a previous role, it was in Excel. My partner spends her day in Power BI, etc etc. Are we outliers? What jobs are mostly in browsers instead of task-oriented specific other software tools?
Sales (CRMs are all in browser now), Marketing (entire stack, include some creative (Canva) is in browser now), Strategy is half in powerpoint/xls (creating content) and half in browser (researching info), HR (Workday, LinkedIn, etc.), product (Figma, Miro, Aha!, Linear), support (Asana/Jira) probably spend at least 50% of their working time in browser. Also the time people are at their desk but not working, is usually in browser (check news, stocks, blogs, personal email, etc.)
If I can't get extensions to work on it the browser just feels useless.
Modern mainstream web is unusable without an ad-blocker. If it can't have uBlock, adguard, etc in it then it's basically useless
Really love the design of your site. Homemade?
Okay if author so ignorant and doesn't even see difference and just genuinely hates this topic why even make an article? "Look see this new things someone else exited about, I don't give a damn about it so much that I'll write post about that, I'll even completely ignore figuring out what's different about it myself and just spew some surface level ignorant overview"
It’s truly amazing how much money is being poured into these companies only for them to produce such boring and uninspired products.
It's interesting that no one in this thread seems to use ChatGPT particularly deeply to understand why this is useful. I think this is very interesting, I don't particularly love Chrome, so a version of Chrome that more deeply integrates with one of the most common things I do in my browser (use ChatGPT) is very interesting!
The point of why "it's so special" is that:
1) a browser contains all the information marketing firms and companies kill for. The buying habits of billions of people, hell it contains more than that: it contains all sorts of data about what exactly makes people buy.
2) OpenAI's browser generates excitement and might actually make this information available for OpenAI to sell
3) This would be a totally new revenue stream for OpenAI, maybe a dozen new revenue streams
>I guess building an actual browser, from scratch
No one does this. For example all the major browsers reach out to an existing library to implement rendering for fonts. There is so mich complexity and already a solution to solve the problems and allow you to focus on something more important. There are benefits in standardizing on a single thing and having everyone working to improveia common base. Considering the actual rendering and functionality of the web is standardized the most exciting features kf a browser will be outside of the browser engine.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658479
>To the surprise of literally nobody, it’s Chromium with AI slapped on top
We should start calling browsers "Chromiums."
My favorite Chromium is Vivaldi, by the way. It doesn't have AI slapped on it, but it has native a RSS client, e-mail client, vertical tabs, notes, a way to separate tabs into "workspaces" and a way to save tabs into "sessions" that you can reopen later, and it native profiles like Chrome. There are also countless settings you can customize (and lots of terrible defaults that you will want to customize, like rocker gestures). It's pretty much Opera 2.0 without the crypto. These features feel to me far more useful than AI.
Love Vivaldi! It has improved significantly over the years! I use it in tandem with Firefox.
I love to have thumbnail tabs!
"Chromia" has a nice ring to it. "OpenAI just increased the number of Chromia by one."
This is so underwhelming.
Worse: The main way it could whelm involves exploiting the user for evil.
To every billionaire in America right now who can read this...
I haven't used any of the AI stuff that's been released so far. It doesn't appear to have affected my day to day in any manner but I'm not particularly connected in the first place I suppose.
But this browser, with the AI on the top of it? I haven't used it yet. But it sounds life changing. I'll be surprised if I have a job in three weeks now that this is out. And coming off that Sora drop? DAMN! Haven't used that either but I heard it's a really expensive tic tac that gets boring after 10 minutes.
Anyways, please give all your money to Sam Altman. He needs 7 trillion dollars. And with results like these, the path forward must be paved with gold. So pour, all of your money, right into this one, please.
companies are just riding the hype of the last tool, last season was cursor, then clis and now browsers
This is a funny post. Shows how deeply technical folks fail to understand business, risk, and open source.
Chromium is great. Why exactly should they innovate their first? A v1 should take whats available and not seek to reinvent the wheel.
umm, I am not a fan of any of the recent new browsers but what's wrong with Chromium in itself? I think Chromium is pretty good, technologically mature, foss.
Chromium is highly dependent on Google’s interests. We see how they chose to implement Manifest V3 in a way that, through a strange coincidence(/s), neuters the capabilities of Ad Blocking extensions.
All downstream browsers are affected by Google’s bottom line. Putting lipstick and a few nice features on top of an engine that you don’t control doesn’t make your browser a true alternative from Google’s.
TLDR: yet another blogger demonstrating a complete lack of intellectual curiosity by completely dismissing an idea instead of exploring its potential.
There is a lot to discuss about a browser that has an LLM with local, personalized memory and follows and assists you on every interaction. But ”this is just chromium with AI on top” is a lazy take
Look, another article about AI
AI is newsworthy.
That's subjective. I don't consider Chromium retrofitted with Chat-GPT newsworthy. Some people might. I also don't fault the commenter for being tired of the majority of content on this site being LLM-adjacent. I'm certainly over it.
Why would they build their own browser from scratch? That would be dumb without a significantly compelling reason. The author of this post reminds me of one of those guys who writes an entirely new game engine instead of using an off the shelf product and ends up never completing the game..
Good grief. Developers who use Unity/Unreal/Game Maker/ whatever don’t announce their game as being a revolutionary new tech.
The problem isn’t that they made yet another chromium based browser with their garbage on top. The problem is that they’re positioning it as this exciting and radical new thing when it’s just chromium with their garbage on top.
You’re not the target audience for the announcement, but like many people, they probably already know that and just want to be annoyed.
Who exactly is the target audience? Browser not exactly a hot bed of competition. Am I in the market for an AI browser? No.
But is anyone?
Those features are already being pushed in the browsers people actually use.
Surely they should just be able to prompt their code assistant to write a complete browser and come back in a couple days to find it running, right?
They could simply vibe-code a new browser engine from scratch using gpt - I believe that's the whole purpose of the AI stories?
I'm curious why these things are not distributed as extensions rather than full browsers.
Why the negativity? A browser is the gateway between end user and technology/information/AI themselves.
Of course everyone with money is racing trying to control it. It makes sense.
Because people are tired of seeing LLMs, which aren't even good at the things they are claimed to be good at, shoehorned into everything whether or not it provides a shred of value to the user.
> Why the negativity?
Because:
> A browser is the gateway between end user and technology/information/AI themselves. Of course everyone with money is racing trying to control it.
?
What's the benefit for the consumer?