Look, Another AI Browser
manuelmoreale.com
manuelmoreale.com
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
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 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.
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.
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 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.)
Same here - technically there are "forks" of the Chrome browser. Just like technically when I press a button on GitHub page, I've created a Doom 3 "fork". Yay, look at me, I'm the next Carmack! Behold my programming skills! Then I click another button, and now I've "forked" Servo. Now I get to be a browser creator too!
The fact is that I did no work in forking that code and as soon as real Doom 3 or Servo code changes, I would need to either accept all those changes or abandon this silly notion. Same with so called Chrome "forks". They all accept anything that Google pushes into the original Chrome, regardless of the change. Google wants some new protocol they have invented to be put in Chrome? All Chrome "forks" accept it. Google wants to limit adblocking? All Chrome clones accept it of course. And so on. Any real fundamental changes to the Chrome are pushed to all so called "forks".
So yeah, there are countless "forks" of Chrome in the letter of the word, just like I have a Doom 3 "fork" too. But there are no real forks of Chrome in the spirit of the word.
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.
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.
Chromium browsers eat my RAM and drain my computer battery.
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 are the security patches of the past couple of months?
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'.
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."
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.
This actually reminds me that early in the HTML5 era one of its key selling points was that you could play videos using just the <video> element. There would not be a need for Flash, Silverlight or JS. However these days it is extremely rare to come across a site that can successfully play videos with JS turned off. Complicated JS has de facto become a requirement for videos but it doesn't have to be.
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 ;)
your needs are not the majority's and you know it
I will use an "AI browser" over my dead body.
It's just not exciting to me.
I am not sure if this is happening, but as blocking becomes more prevalent, having a widely-used browser will help.
The reason is that it's easier to block bot hosting providers. That's why illegal botnets rely on compromised personal machines.
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
"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..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like flying a plane but instead of logging flight data digitally, you film the cockpit gauges with a camcorder.
And any browser on iOS uses the safari engine under the hood?
Looks like we are down to two browsers.
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...
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.
Ladybird is coming along.
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.
I love to have thumbnail tabs!
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
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.
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
Anthropic came to the same conclusion. SSI either doesn't have something commercializable or came to a different conclusion.
Like an information OS for the information cloud.
They also pioneered reasoning models, which are probably the biggest breakthrough since GPT-3 on the AGI tech tree.
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.
>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 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.
Chromium is great. Why exactly should they innovate their first? A v1 should take whats available and not seek to reinvent the wheel.
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.
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.
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
Of course everyone with money is racing trying to control it. It makes sense.
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.
?
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.
But is anyone?
Those features are already being pushed in the browsers people actually use.