OpenAI didn’t plan to make a browser. Not at first, anyway. But ever since the company launched ChatGPT, it started to see lots of users do the same thing. “You’d have this tab open on chatgpt.com, and you’d be working on something else somewhere in your browser,” says Adam Fry, a product lead on the ChatGPT team. “And people are doing this behavior where they’re copying and pasting back and forth with ChatGPT. Hey, here’s what I’m working on, can you help me with this?”
Eventually OpenAI came to a realization, the same one that has swept through the tech industry over the last couple of years: Browsers are the secret to everything. Your web browser is practically guaranteed to be the most-used app on your computer. It’s definitely the only one that can access your email, your bank accounts, your confidential work spreadsheets, and your doomscrolling platforms of choice. It’s the richest source of information about you, your activity, and your life. It is, as Fry puts it, “the operating system for your life.”
For any general-purpose AI assistant to work, it needs to be where the users are. And the users are in browsers. So OpenAI made a browser, called ChatGPT Atlas. It’s a simple app, with a row of tabs at the top and a big ChatGPT text box every time you open a new one. You can use Atlas to ask questions about the tab you’re currently using or collate data across tabs. ChatGPT can fill out forms for you across the web, and it will even attempt to use Instacart to buy you groceries if you ask. You can use ChatGPT to query your entire browsing history, or use what it’s learned about you in your other work and conversations.
This is the pitch for the AI browser, a new category of web browser that has rapidly emerged over the past few months. You can do similar things, inside a similar-looking app, with Comet, Perplexity’s browser. Or with Dia, The Browser Company’s AI-first browser. Microsoft’s Edge is turning into an AI browser, and even Chrome has gotten a big injection of Gemini over the last year, too. All these browsers have roughly the same ideas, built on roughly the same tech — and they’re all hoping their bots are so helpful you might think about switching.
You probably spent the last decade or so not thinking much about your web browser. You use the one that comes with your device, or more likely, use that built-in one to download Google Chrome. Then you never switch again. Web browsers show webpages, and mostly do it fine. They’ve seemed like a solved problem, or at least one not worth solving any further.
At the same time, though, companies around Silicon Valley have spent years trying to figure out the next big platform. After a generation ruled by the duopoly of Android and iOS, companies everywhere are desperate to stop paying app store royalties and start getting more control of their fate. First they tried to make the metaverse happen and made a lot of noise about Web3. Then, one by one, as AI captured the imaginations of tech companies everywhere, they trained their sights on one of the oldest, least exciting, and most important apps we all use all the time. They’re all coming for your tabs.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
In the annals of the browser wars, the conflict has spiked at two important moments in the development of the internet. The first was, of course, at the beginning of the internet when the whole idea of a “web browser” became a thing. That was in the late 1990s, when an academic project known as Mosaic turned into a browser called Netscape Navigator. That became a huge hit and opened millions of people’s eyes to the possibilities of this thing called the World Wide Web. Then Microsoft built its own browser, Internet Explorer, and used every ounce of its considerable might to bully Netscape out of the market. That turned into a landmark antitrust case, which left both Netscape and Microsoft somewhat debilitated in their efforts to win the web.
In the mid-2000s, with the browser makers stuck in litigation, the browsers themselves languished even as the web’s population grew fast. Two new combatants picked up the fight. There was Mozilla Firefox, a project born out of Netscape’s tech (and with the help of a lot of its team). And there was a team inside of Google, led by a budding executive named Sundar Pichai, that built a browser called Chrome.
If the first browser war had been about giving people access to websites, the second was about giving you more to do with them. Instead of static pages designed to be downloaded, developers were using new standards and tools to create interactive applications — Gmail, Facebook, and other platforms were showing off just how much you could do with the web. Pichai and the Chrome team focused relentlessly on making these applications load fast and work smoothly, and eventually helped turn desktop computing from a series of apps to a series of browser tabs.
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