Look, Another AI Browser

> Yesterday, OpenAI announced Atlas, its AI browser. To the surprise of literally nobody, it’s Chromium with AI slapped on top. Perplexity also has a browser: it’s called Comet, and it also is Chromium with AI slapped on top. Then we have DIA, which is, you guessed it, Chromium with AI slapped on top. I think Opera also has one of those Chromium browsers with AI slapped on top.

The interesting thing is what they "slap on top" of it then. In other words like a browser extension, how do they extend the browser? It's common to have a base model of something and then extend it with options of various capabilities. I don't really understand the complaint here.

The interesting thing to me about OpenAI's browser is how they will handle ad blockers. 95% of ChatGPT users use the free version and OpenAI needs to monetize that.

Building a chromium replacement is a daunting task. in fact microsoft gave up on thiers and adopted chromium for that reason. Chromium is an industry wide open source project like linux for good reason

I'd like a Chromium base model that I can add AI features to that I need. We have a mechanism for that called extensions, but I imagine there are features that require deeper integration with Chromium. We had a mechanism for that called ActiveX on IE and Netscape Plugins on other browsers but we got rid of that for security reasons.

We're at an interesting point in browser development and I'm excited about it

Building on top of a bunch of things works well, and is pretty much what Chromium itself is anyways. Building something "new" that is 99% the old thing so you can add your 1% is a different kind of building, and can't be lumped with the former by default. More powerful extensions is definitely the answer, just not one Google wants to allow.

The main problem with this is if browser A adds feature 1 and browser B adds feature 2 then you don't end up with "Chromium + 1 + 2" you end up with "Chromium + 1" or "Chromium + 2". Repeat for a couple dozen Chromium folks and your single extra feature doesn't look all that enticing anymore. The inverse way of looking at it is "if you're only adding 1% on top of Chromium, it's unlikely to amount to anything worth the average user switching for". Especially since Chrome is starting to push Gemeni natively anyways.

For these reasons, I think Chromium paint jobs are the least interesting thing to happen to browser development in a very very long time. Servo for embedded, Ladybird for "something different", and so on are much more interesting. These kinds of things, as you say, are more to the scale of what an individual browser extension used to be.

I've been very impressed by the open source Ladybird project for several years now. I wasn't up to date and didn't realize it had 8 full time engineers working on it now with project leader Andreas Kling. This is truely more promising than "slapping things on Chromium" and competing with Google Chrome.

I didn't explicity state but was implying that a new plug in archeticture to the open source Chromium project might be an interesting way to add AI features in a more democratic fashion.

Either path still has to compete with what Google does with proprietary extensions to Chrome.

Edit to be clear: Since Chromium is open source, the community could actually collaborate on adding a shared AI plugin architecture to the core project rather than making competing forks. That would solve the fragmentation problem entirely.

>Chromium is an industry wide[...]

But is it though? Feels to me like Google just does whatever it wants. Nobody except Google wants manifest v3. Nobody wants "Web Environment Integrity", etc.

I agree that Google's control over the Chromium roadmap is a fundamental issue, making "industry-wide" a generous term. Brave (which I use) and other Chromium-forks exist to ensure the community does have its own branch. Brave disables WEI and forked the Manifest V2 code to ensure its built-in Shields and essential extensions (like uBlock Origin, which I also use) remain unaffected by Google's anti-user changes.

The bothering part is the browser factor form. Why not just an extension?

> 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).

Wasn't that covered in the comment you're replying to

> That "good" reason is thanks to Google's monopoly. Chromium is only technically opensource

That accusation is instantly disproven by the fact that the parent post literally cites 4 competitors that forked and extended it. Unless you can cite Google illegally shutting down attempts to produce a competing fork, your accusation has no basis. (If you can cite such a thing, I'd rather you bring them to court instead.)

It's trivial for any Tom, Dick and Harry to fork an opensource project and "extend" it - but none have so far actually extended the engine - have they implemented any new W3C standards or fixed any compliance bugs? Have they made any improvements to the rendering engine? I'm not aware of any of the forks doing anything significant, besides just superficial UI features and preventing merging certain pieces of code (like Manifest V3). If any of the forks have deviated in any significant way (like how Blink deviated from Webkit), please do enlighten me, because otherwise they're just copies dependent largely on Google for all the core improvements.

More than half of the committers on Chromium aren't Google employees. I assume the reason they haven't gone off and forked it is because they have no reason to.

They probably haven't forked it because they know it's a futile effort to maintain and develop something as complex as Blink. Anyone who's ever worked on a large project like that knows very well it's easier to start from scratch, even if it's going to take a herculean effort.

There is letter of the law and there is spirit of the law in the legal space.

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.

A "community" collaboration would run into the same problems as Chromium - the companies making these skins want the browser to be based around their product instead of having the browser be the product.