7 ms·

Look, Another AI Browser

226 points by v3am 11mo ago

theusus 11mo ago
Look, another article about AI
- icapybara 11mo ago
  AI is newsworthy.
  - tinfoilhatter 11mo ago
    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.
phplovesong 11mo ago
Its not "AI slapped on top" but AI slopped on top. I will use an "AI browser" over my dead body.
- nextworddev 11mo ago
  until your company rolls it out
  - stalfosknight 11mo ago
    Please don't give the pointy-haired boss ideas.
- Ferret7446 11mo ago
  Presumably the "I" in this scenario is your AI replacement, since you're dead in this scenario?
btown 11mo ago
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.
- microtonal 11mo ago
  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.
  - ikmckenz 11mo ago
    Why won't these sites simply block this browser?
    - jazzyjackson 11mo ago
      Because this browser is just chromium and its user agent will be indistinguishable
      - wahnfrieden 11mo ago
        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.
    - Zetaphor 11mo ago
      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
ngruhn 11mo ago
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...
- deciduously 11mo ago
  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?
  - mguerville 11mo ago
    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.)
- glenstein 11mo ago
  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.
  - 11mo ago
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
Can easily bypass captcha when your human confirms it for you.
josefritzishere 11mo ago
This is so underwhelming.
- Terr_ 11mo ago
  Worse: The main way it could whelm involves exploiting the user for evil.
bengoodger 11mo ago
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.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  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.
- hashim-warren 11mo ago
  I would like scratch made browser to focus on performance. Chromium browsers eat my RAM and drain my computer battery.
  - stalfosknight 11mo ago
    Try Safari. No browser is snappier or more power efficient.
- mathieudombrock 11mo ago
  I think Google has proven with their recent actions concerning android that they really can't be trusted with big, critical open source projects.
  - bigyabai 11mo ago
    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.
codeflo 11mo ago
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.
- aabhay 11mo ago
  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.
  - sikimiki 11mo ago
    Is there a correct answer?
    - zurfer 11mo ago
      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.
  - ghjv 11mo ago
    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?
- superjose 11mo ago
  I think they need to respond to all the funds they've raised and need to generate money somehow beyond subscriptions.
- Terretta 11mo ago
  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.
deepanwadhwa 11mo ago
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.
- Renaud 11mo ago
  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.
jqpabc123 11mo ago
I guess if you ask ChatGPT to build a browser for you, this is what you get.
anshumankmr 11mo ago
If I can't get extensions to work on it the browser just feels useless.
- ihorcher 11mo ago
  Modern mainstream web is unusable without an ad-blocker. If it can't have uBlock, adguard, etc in it then it's basically useless
glenstein 11mo ago
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.
jackblemming 11mo ago
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..
- floren 11mo ago
  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?
- jobigoud 11mo ago
  I'm curious why these things are not distributed as extensions rather than full browsers.
- thedelanyo 11mo ago
  They could simply vibe-code a new browser engine from scratch using gpt - I believe that's the whole purpose of the AI stories?
- hellotomyrars 11mo ago
  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.
  - jackblemming 11mo ago
    You’re not the target audience for the announcement, but like many people, they probably already know that and just want to be annoyed.
    - hellotomyrars 11mo ago
      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.
thelastgallon 11mo ago
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.
- CapmCrackaWaka 11mo ago
  I use Orion as my daily driver, mostly because of its Kagi integration.
- L3viathan 11mo ago
  Firefox still exists.
  - stOneskull 11mo ago
    firefox is the best, and gemini in google search results is enough, for me.
- SoKamil 11mo ago
  >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-engines/ https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  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.
  - yogorenapan 11mo ago
    Chromium is Blink and whatever common ancestor they share has diverged much over the past decade
ztratar 11mo ago
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.
guluarte 11mo ago
companies are just riding the hype of the last tool, last season was cursor, then clis and now browsers
didip 11mo ago
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.
- magicalist 11mo ago
  > 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. ?
- bigstrat2003 11mo ago
  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.
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  What's the benefit for the consumer?
AlienRobot 11mo ago
>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.
- sfink 11mo ago
  "Chromia" has a nice ring to it. "OpenAI just increased the number of Chromia by one."
- superjose 11mo ago
  Love Vivaldi! It has improved significantly over the years! I use it in tandem with Firefox. I love to have thumbnail tabs!
tehryanx 11mo ago
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.
- binarymax 11mo ago
  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.
  - reassess_blind 11mo ago
    Because the models are stagnating.
  - yunyu 11mo ago
    It’s good for collecting a lot of computer use trajectory data
ryanrasti 11mo ago
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
ChrisArchitect 11mo ago
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658479
thm 11mo ago
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.
labrador 11mo ago
> 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
- zamadatix 11mo ago
  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.
charcircuit 11mo ago
>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.
CjHuber 11mo ago
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
nikolay 11mo ago
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!
throwacct 11mo ago
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.
spwa4 11mo ago
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
cowmix 11mo ago
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.
wilg 11mo ago
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!
chrisstanchak 11mo ago
Really love the design of your site. Homemade?
ihorcher 11mo ago
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
- harrisoned 11mo ago
  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.
yahoozoo 11mo ago
It’s truly amazing how much money is being poured into these companies only for them to produce such boring and uninspired products.
codyb 11mo ago
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.
khazhoux 11mo ago
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
qustrolabe 11mo ago
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"
pjmlp 11mo ago
Naturally based on Chrome, fot the Chrome OS Platform, formerly known as Web.
sirotop 11mo ago
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

226 points by v3am 11mo ago

theusus 11mo ago

Look, another article about AI

icapybara 11mo ago
AI is newsworthy.
- tinfoilhatter 11mo ago
  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.

phplovesong 11mo ago

Its not "AI slapped on top" but AI slopped on top. I will use an "AI browser" over my dead body.

nextworddev 11mo ago
until your company rolls it out
- stalfosknight 11mo ago
  Please don't give the pointy-haired boss ideas.
Ferret7446 11mo ago
Presumably the "I" in this scenario is your AI replacement, since you're dead in this scenario?

btown 11mo ago

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.

microtonal 11mo ago
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.
- ikmckenz 11mo ago
  Why won't these sites simply block this browser?
  - jazzyjackson 11mo ago
    Because this browser is just chromium and its user agent will be indistinguishable
    - wahnfrieden 11mo ago
      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.
  - Zetaphor 11mo ago
    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

ngruhn 11mo ago

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...

deciduously 11mo ago
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?
- mguerville 11mo ago
  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.)
glenstein 11mo ago
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.
- 11mo ago

giancarlostoro 11mo ago

Can easily bypass captcha when your human confirms it for you.

josefritzishere 11mo ago

This is so underwhelming.

Terr_ 11mo ago
Worse: The main way it could whelm involves exploiting the user for evil.

bengoodger 11mo ago

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.

glenstein 11mo ago
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.
hashim-warren 11mo ago
I would like scratch made browser to focus on performance. Chromium browsers eat my RAM and drain my computer battery.
- stalfosknight 11mo ago
  Try Safari. No browser is snappier or more power efficient.
mathieudombrock 11mo ago
I think Google has proven with their recent actions concerning android that they really can't be trusted with big, critical open source projects.
- bigyabai 11mo ago
  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.

codeflo 11mo ago

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.

aabhay 11mo ago
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.
- sikimiki 11mo ago
  Is there a correct answer?
  - zurfer 11mo ago
    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.
- ghjv 11mo ago
  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?
superjose 11mo ago
I think they need to respond to all the funds they've raised and need to generate money somehow beyond subscriptions.
Terretta 11mo ago
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.

deepanwadhwa 11mo ago

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.

Renaud 11mo ago
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.

jqpabc123 11mo ago

I guess if you ask ChatGPT to build a browser for you, this is what you get.

anshumankmr 11mo ago

If I can't get extensions to work on it the browser just feels useless.

ihorcher 11mo ago
Modern mainstream web is unusable without an ad-blocker. If it can't have uBlock, adguard, etc in it then it's basically useless

glenstein 11mo ago

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.

jackblemming 11mo ago

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..

floren 11mo ago
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?
jobigoud 11mo ago
I'm curious why these things are not distributed as extensions rather than full browsers.
thedelanyo 11mo ago
They could simply vibe-code a new browser engine from scratch using gpt - I believe that's the whole purpose of the AI stories?
hellotomyrars 11mo ago
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.
- jackblemming 11mo ago
  You’re not the target audience for the announcement, but like many people, they probably already know that and just want to be annoyed.
  - hellotomyrars 11mo ago
    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.

thelastgallon 11mo ago

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.

CapmCrackaWaka 11mo ago
I use Orion as my daily driver, mostly because of its Kagi integration.
L3viathan 11mo ago
Firefox still exists.
- stOneskull 11mo ago
  firefox is the best, and gemini in google search results is enough, for me.
SoKamil 11mo ago
>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-engines/ https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
jimbokun 11mo ago
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.
- yogorenapan 11mo ago
  Chromium is Blink and whatever common ancestor they share has diverged much over the past decade

ztratar 11mo ago

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.

guluarte 11mo ago

companies are just riding the hype of the last tool, last season was cursor, then clis and now browsers

didip 11mo ago

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.

magicalist 11mo ago
> 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. ?
bigstrat2003 11mo ago
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.
jimbokun 11mo ago
What's the benefit for the consumer?

AlienRobot 11mo ago

>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.

sfink 11mo ago
"Chromia" has a nice ring to it. "OpenAI just increased the number of Chromia by one."
superjose 11mo ago
Love Vivaldi! It has improved significantly over the years! I use it in tandem with Firefox. I love to have thumbnail tabs!

tehryanx 11mo ago

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.

binarymax 11mo ago
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.
- reassess_blind 11mo ago
  Because the models are stagnating.
- yunyu 11mo ago
  It’s good for collecting a lot of computer use trajectory data

ryanrasti 11mo ago

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

ChrisArchitect 11mo ago

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658479

thm 11mo ago

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.

labrador 11mo ago

> 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

zamadatix 11mo ago
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.

charcircuit 11mo ago

>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.

CjHuber 11mo ago

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

nikolay 11mo ago

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!

throwacct 11mo ago

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.

spwa4 11mo ago

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

cowmix 11mo ago

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.

wilg 11mo ago

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!

chrisstanchak 11mo ago

Really love the design of your site. Homemade?

ihorcher 11mo ago

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

harrisoned 11mo ago
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.

yahoozoo 11mo ago

It’s truly amazing how much money is being poured into these companies only for them to produce such boring and uninspired products.

codyb 11mo ago

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.

khazhoux 11mo ago

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

qustrolabe 11mo ago

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"

pjmlp 11mo ago

Naturally based on Chrome, fot the Chrome OS Platform, formerly known as Web.

sirotop 11mo ago

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