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Look, Another AI Browser

(manuelmoreale.com)
220 points v3am | 3 comments | 22 Oct 25 17:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.472s | source
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labrador ◴[22 Oct 25 18:44 UTC] No.45673412[source]▶
> 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

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1. encom ◴[22 Oct 25 19:50 UTC] No.45674254[source]▶
>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.

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2. ◴[22 Oct 25 20:03 UTC] No.45674425[source]▶
3. labrador ◴[22 Oct 25 20:05 UTC] No.45674445[source]▶
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.