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

> 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).

> 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.