[HN Gopher] Look, Another AI Browser
___________________________________________________________________
Look, Another AI Browser
Author : v3am
Score : 188 points
Date : 2025-10-22 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (manuelmoreale.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (manuelmoreale.com)
| theusus wrote:
| Look, another article about AI
| icapybara wrote:
| AI is newsworthy.
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Its not "AI slapped on top" but AI slopped on top.
|
| I will use an "AI browser" over my dead body.
| nextworddev wrote:
| until your company rolls it out
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Please don't give the pointy-haired boss ideas.
| btown wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why won't these sites simply block this browser?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Because this browser is just chromium and its user agent
| will be indistinguishable
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| xena wrote:
| I downloaded it to see if Anubis can block it. It lies and
| claims to be Google Chrome.
| btown wrote:
| 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, moose bites Kan
| be pretty nasti..."
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| 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.
| ljm wrote:
| 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.
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| 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.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| I do too. Those days are gone. The profit motive makes
| everything - even cool things - feel adversarial to me.
| everdrive wrote:
| If such a browser was unavoidable I'd just drop off the web and
| read books. They can only turn the screws so much.
| neom wrote:
| I hear Ray Bradbury is a pretty good novelist.
| ngruhn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Building a successful platform has always been the winning
| move from the beginning of the computer industry.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Can easily bypass captcha when your human confirms it for you.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| This is so underwhelming.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Worse: The main way it _could_ whelm involves exploiting the
| user for evil.
| bengoodger wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I would like scratch made browser to focus on performance.
|
| Chromium browsers eat my RAM and drain my computer battery.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Try Safari. No browser is snappier or more power efficient.
| mathieudombrock wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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._
| MYEUHD wrote:
| Where is the source code for AOSP 16 QPR1?
|
| Where are the security patches of the past couple of
| months?
| bitpush wrote:
| What is QPR?
| bitpush wrote:
| > 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'.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I'd like to see browsers support the Gemini protocol and the
| Gemtext format.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Full support for Ublock Origin. Perhaps at the native level
| rather than as an extension.
| username223 wrote:
| > 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."
| bengoodger wrote:
| 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.
| thyristan wrote:
| > 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 ;)
| codeflo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is there a correct answer?
| zurfer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think they need to respond to all the funds they've raised
| and need to generate money somehow beyond subscriptions.
| Terretta wrote:
| 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.
| codyb wrote:
| I suspect that this will always be just one more year away
| like Tesla's robotaxis
| ninininino wrote:
| 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.
| bloppe wrote:
| 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?
| in-silico wrote:
| 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.
| hadlock wrote:
| 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.
| deepanwadhwa wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I guess if you ask ChatGPT to build a browser for you, this is
| what you get.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| If I can't get extensions to work on it the browser just feels
| useless.
| ihorcher wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm curious why these things are not distributed as extensions
| rather than full browsers.
| thedelanyo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I use Orion as my daily driver, mostly because of its Kagi
| integration.
| SoKamil wrote:
| >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...
| L3viathan wrote:
| Firefox still exists.
| stOneskull wrote:
| firefox is the best, and gemini in google search results is
| enough, for me.
| jimbokun wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Chromium is Blink and whatever common ancestor they share has
| diverged much over the past decade
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Zen is a really nice Firefox fork.
|
| Ladybird is coming along.
| jdiff wrote:
| 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.
| leshokunin wrote:
| There's Orion. It's not bad, but I don't love it either.
| ztratar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| companies are just riding the hype of the last tool, last season
| was cursor, then clis and now browsers
| didip wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What's the benefit for the consumer?
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| "Chromia" has a nice ring to it. "OpenAI just increased the
| number of Chromia by one."
| superjose wrote:
| Love Vivaldi! It has improved significantly over the years! I
| use it in tandem with Firefox.
|
| I love to have thumbnail tabs!
| ryanrasti wrote:
| 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
| tehryanx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Because the models are stagnating.
| yunyu wrote:
| It's good for collecting a lot of computer use trajectory
| data
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658479
| thm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| labrador wrote:
| 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.
| encom wrote:
| >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.
| labrador wrote:
| 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.
| juancroldan wrote:
| The bothering part is the browser factor form. Why not just an
| extension?
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| > _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).
| charcircuit wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Really love the design of your site. Homemade?
| ihorcher wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's truly amazing how much money is being poured into these
| companies only for them to produce such boring and uninspired
| products.
| codyb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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"
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