Browser wars, a hallmark of the late 1990s tech world, are back with a vengeance — and OpenAI just entered the race

TITLE: AI-Powered Browsers Redefine Web Navigation as Tech Giants Vie for Digital Dominance

The Resurgence of Browser Competition in the AI Era

The digital landscape is witnessing a dramatic transformation as artificial intelligence reshapes one of computing’s most fundamental tools: the web browser. What began as simple navigation utilities have evolved into intelligent assistants capable of understanding, predicting, and executing user intentions. This shift marks the most significant change in how we interact with the internet since the browser’s invention three decades ago., according to further reading

The Resurgence of Browser Competition in the AI Era
From Navigation to Delegation: The AI Browser Revolution
The New Contenders in the AI Browser Arena
Technical Foundations: The Chromium Backbone
The Strategic Value of Browser Control
Changing User Behavior and the “Dark Internet”
The Hybrid Approach: Balancing Human and AI Control
Market Dynamics and Future Outlook

From Navigation to Delegation: The AI Browser Revolution

For nearly twenty years, the browsing experience remained remarkably consistent. Users typed URLs or search queries, clicked links, and navigated between pages. The core functionality changed little despite incremental improvements in speed, security, and tab management. Now, companies are betting that users want more than just navigation—they want delegation.

“This is probably the biggest shift since we’ve seen the browser itself become the gateway to the internet,” explains George Chalhoub, assistant professor at UCL Interaction Centre. “For 30 years, the browser was about navigation. Type, click, explore. Now, with AI, it’s changing the model completely. It’s moving from browsing to delegating.”, according to industry news

The New Contenders in the AI Browser Arena

The competitive landscape has expanded beyond traditional players to include AI-native companies. OpenAI’s recent introduction of ChatGPT Atlas represents a significant milestone, placing conversational AI at the center of the browsing experience. Unlike traditional browsers that display search results as lists of links, Atlas aims to provide direct answers and perform tasks through a paid agent mode that can conduct autonomous searches.

Meanwhile, established players are adapting to the new paradigm. Google has integrated its Gemini AI model into Chrome, while Opera and newcomers like Perplexity are introducing agentic capabilities that can read pages, summarize information, and execute multi-step actions such as booking appointments or managing emails., according to further reading

Technical Foundations: The Chromium Backbone

Despite the front-end innovations, most AI browsers share a common technical foundation. The Chromium project, primarily developed and maintained by Google, underpins the majority of modern browsers, including many AI-enhanced versions. This open-source backbone handles the complex tasks of web rendering, memory management, and security protocols.

Building a browser from scratch remains prohibitively complex, requiring companies to recreate everything from rendering engines to encryption systems. Even Microsoft eventually abandoned its proprietary engine and rebuilt Edge on Chromium. As Chalhoub notes, “It’s literally reinventing the wheel. I don’t see any company building its browser from scratch.”, as previous analysis

The Strategic Value of Browser Control

Why are AI companies so determined to develop their own browsers? The answer lies in control over the user’s digital ecosystem. As Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s Chief Business Officer, explains, “The browser is what we live in during the day on our desktop devices. It’s just an incredibly powerful canvas, and in terms of being able to create value for users, it gives us a much bigger surface area… it requires us to know more about you and have more context.”

The ultimate prize extends beyond web navigation to controlling the gateway to users’ entire digital lives—emails, calendars, documents, and messaging platforms. Companies envision AI agents that can seamlessly operate across this ecosystem, performing complex tasks that currently require manual intervention across multiple applications.

Changing User Behavior and the “Dark Internet”

The transition to AI-powered browsing represents a fundamental shift in how humans interact with information. Himanshu Tyagi, co-founder of Sentient, describes this evolution: “The whole notion of search changed. It’s not to point to the place where you can find your answer or do your thing, but to give you that answer and do that thing. We are moving to sort of a dark internet, in the sense that it’s not meant for just humans. It’s meant for bots to consume and process information. Bots do things and give humans the final thing.”

However, changing deeply ingrained user habits presents a significant challenge. The traditional browser represents one of the oldest and most familiar digital tools, valued for its stability and predictability. As Chalhoub observes, “Changing user habits takes time, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as how we explore the web.”

The Hybrid Approach: Balancing Human and AI Control

Current AI browsers represent a middle ground between fully autonomous agents and traditional human-driven navigation. Platforms like Perplexity’s Comet, OpenAI’s Atlas, and Chrome with Gemini allow both humans and AI models to access the web simultaneously, with agents working alongside users or handling separate tasks in different tabs.

This hybrid approach offers significant advantages. Unlike chatbot interfaces that require special protocols to interact with third-party content, AI browsers can access the web directly using established standards. This eliminates the need for additional integration layers while providing both human and AI agents with identical access to web resources.

Market Dynamics and Future Outlook

While Google continues to dominate the browser market, its search supremacy shows signs of erosion. According to analytics, Google’s global search market share recently dropped below 90% for the first time in a decade, with AI alternatives gaining traction. Surveys indicate growing preference for AI-powered search, with ChatGPT’s recognition as a primary search provider increasing significantly in recent months.

Nevertheless, Chrome’s position as the dominant browser remains largely unchallenged, as many users still access AI services through Chrome tabs. The true test will be whether AI companies can create browsing experiences compelling enough to change this behavior permanently.

As Krystan Kolondra, EVP of Browsers at Opera, notes, “The browser wars are starting and the competition is heating up because browsers today are the operating system of your applications. The browser world is extremely important because it is more aware than the operating system itself about what’s happening on your pages.”

The outcome of this new browser war will determine not only which companies control our primary interface with the digital world but also how fundamentally AI will transform our relationship with information, tasks, and the internet itself.