The early days of the Internet saw intense competition between graphical web browsers: Netscape Navigator faced off against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. No sooner had Explorer won this struggle than a new war broke out for market sharing between Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome. This time, Chrome has emerged as the dominant player, with a market share exceeding 60% for most of the past decade, while the next closest competitor, Apple’s Safari, has been stuck in the mid-teens.
But now, AI is revolutionizing the browser market, as companies are starting to integrate new generative and agentic AI capabilities directly into their web navigation tool. This, in turn, sparks a fierce new user war, as Google Chrome, now optimized with Google’s Gemini AI model, tries to fight off startups like Perplexity, with its Comet AI browser, and veterans beaten in previous browser battles, like Opera, who try to get their mojo back with AI improvements. also.
For nearly two decades, the basic browsing experience has remained largely unchanged, except for a few minor improvements. Users type a url into the navigation bar, or type a search query in the same space — a feature first pioneered by Opera but quickly copied by Google — and the browser takes the user to that web address or search results page, which displays a list of links. Click on the link and your browser will take you to that web page.
Now, technology companies are betting that users want a new kind of experience: a browser that can answer questions, not just provide a list of links, and that can do much more than just take a user to a web page — a browser that can perform tasks for the user on that page, such as booking travel or completing a purchase.
“This is probably the biggest shift since we saw the browser itself become a gateway to the Internet. For 30 years, the browser was about navigation. Type, click, explore. Now, with artificial intelligence, it completely changes the paradigm. It’s moving from browsing to delegation,” said George Shalhoub, an assistant professor at the UCLA Interaction Center. luck.
Technology companies, including Perplexity and Opera, have already launched AI-powered browsers that can perform tasks on behalf of users. Perplexity’s Comet combines a web browser with a built-in AI agent that can read pages, summarize information, and even perform multi-step actions, such as booking appointments or sending emails. Likewise, Opera’s Neon offers features like “Do,” which can perform actions on the user’s behalf, and “Cards,” which store personalized workflows and prompt for repeated use.
“The browser wars are on and the competition is heating up because today browsers are the operating system for your apps,” said Christian Colondra, Executive Vice President of Browsers at Opera. luck. “The browser world is very important because it is more aware than the operating system itself of what is happening on your pages.”
The vision of AI-powered browsing recasts the traditional browser not just as an access tool, but as the primary interface through which AI agents operate.
“The whole idea of search has changed,” said Himanshu Tyagi, co-founder of open source AI company Sentent. “The goal is not to point out where you can find your answer or do something, but to give you that answer and do that thing.” “We’re moving to a kind of dark web, meaning it’s not just for humans. It’s for robots to consume and process information. Robots do things and humans give final say.”
If the third round of the browser wars is indeed underway, the battlefield looks very different from the days when the main axes of competition were things like speed and tab management. This time, it’s about which company can deliver a more seamless AI-powered experience while dealing with growing privacy issues and convincing users to change ingrained habits. While the major players like Google Smart newcomers still dominate, testing the limits of what the browser can do.
the The Third Browser Wars
The second round of the browser wars ended with Google Chrome dominating, mostly due to its speed and integration with the broader Google ecosystem. Most browsers are now also based on Chromium, a free and open source web browser project, primarily developed and maintained by Google. Chromium is essentially a back-end system that determines how the browser goes out to find a particular web address, using the index of web pages maintained by Google, and how to display that web page.
While Google still dominates the search market and has taken steps to integrate AI into the search experience, its market share has been declining. according to Analysts at the third bridge, In July, Google’s share of the global search market fell below 90% for the first time in 10 years.
This may be due to the increasing popularity of AI search engines like Perplexity or competition from AI-based chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which launched its own search tool in October last year. In a survey from the brokerage company The Evercore ISI was conducted last year, The number of ChatGPT participants who said ChatGPT is their best search provider rose to 5% from 1% four months ago.
However, Chome’s popularity as a browser has not decreased significantly. While people may send their search queries to ChatGPT or Perplexity, when they use these services on desktop, they are often still using a tab in Chrome to do so.
Given the technical complexity and cost of building a browser from scratch, it is unlikely that most AI companies will develop their own back-end web indexing. Almost all “AI browsers” on the market today, including Perplexity’s Comet browser, are built on Chromium.
Creating a browser entirely from scratch is complex and resource-intensive. To do this, the company will have to recreate everything from how web pages are displayed and memory managed, to encryption systems, sandboxing, video playback, and continuous security patching. until Microsoftwhich was once Google’s fiercest competitor in the browser space, eventually abandoned its own engine and Rebuild edge on chrome.
“It’s literally reinventing the wheel,” Chalhoub said. “I don’t see any company building their browser from scratch.”
Unified interface
But why are AI companies so keen on having their own browser? Confusion, for example Raised eyebrows Earlier this year when it made an unsolicited cash offer of $34.5 billion to buy Google Chrome.
“The browser is what we experience during the day on our desktops,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer at Perplexity. luck Earlier this year. “It’s just an incredibly powerful canvas, and in terms of being able to create value for users, it gives us a lot more latitude…it requires us to know more about you and have more context.”
The real prize for these companies is not online mobility; It controls the gateway to the digital lives of the rest of the users, including many other web-based software applications. Most companies are betting that the true value of AI will be revealed when AI agents have access to a user’s entire ecosystem — emails, calendars, messages, documents — and can perform tasks across them seamlessly.
“There is a myth about applying everything,” Tyagi said. “AI is only magic when it’s with you everywhere in one unified interface. If you have to use one app for your glasses, another on your phone, and another on your laptop, that’s not a complete experience. Magic is when there’s one interface that goes with you everywhere and always reacts to your context.”
Most AI companies are working on autonomous assistants with the goal of making them move seamlessly between different user applications. But they follow different methods to achieve this.
OpenAI appears to be trying to position ChatGPT as a version of this universal interface, not through the browser, but by integrating third-party apps directly into the chatbot so users can search, shop, plan travel, and manage files without ever leaving the conversation.
But changing user habits is not easy at all, and the idea of browsing the web is deeply ingrained in users.
“Changing user habits takes time, especially when it comes to something as basic as how we explore the web,” Shalhoub said. “For most people, the browser is the oldest and most popular tool we use online. In terms of the actual experience, we trust it a lot because it’s stable and predictable.”
However, Chalhoub noted that small conveniences often lead to big behavioral shifts. “If an AI browser can slowly start saving time, automatically booking travel, or summarizing articles, I think people will adapt much faster than we expect.”
In many ways, AI-enabled browsers, like Chrome’s Comet or Gemini, are a hybrid, or halfway house, between the idea of chatbots as the universal interface, where the human user has no direct access to the web at all, and the traditional human-driven web browsing experience. The advantage of an AI browser is that it allows both the human model and the AI model to access the web in exactly the same way – even at the same time, with the agent able to work alongside a human, or work on one process in one tab while the human user works on a different task in another tab. With a web browser, there’s no need to create an entirely new protocol through which an AI model interacts with third-party content and data, such as Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is used to power a lot of “agent” experiences in chatbots.
Privacy problem
Agentic AI browsers have access to much more user data than traditional search engines, which raises a host of privacy concerns. By design, these tools see a lot of what users do online, and can even infer why a user behaves in certain ways.
“Browsers have always been powerful data collection tools, and when you add AI to the mix, that power multiplies,” Chalhoub said. “An AI-powered browser doesn’t just monitor your behavior; it can infer your intentions, habits, and even your mood. Each prompt or summary becomes a data point about you, so the information should be treated responsibly and not used for advertising or profiling.”
Chalhoub also warned that with AI in the loop, it makes it difficult for users to know where their data is going. “It’s definitely a privacy risk, not because AI is inherently bad, but it has a greater context and intent in one place. So companies have to be really responsible in that regard,” he said.
It is already unclear how confidential user conversations with AI-powered chatbots are. For example, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently warned that users currently have no legal protection over their ChatGPT conversations in the event they are subpoenaed. Allowing an AI agent to crawl through emails, texts, and other highly sensitive data could risk exposure Deeply personal information if not handled with care, raises serious questions about how much control users really have over their private data.
Technology companies, for their part, are aware of the new privacy risks presented by AI agents. Opera’s Neon only processes data when users request it, such as when summarizing a page, and all requests are end-to-end encrypted, Colondra said. “We don’t use that data to train our models,” he added.
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