RIP "Browsers" (blog.jim-nielsen.com)

Big browsers are becoming AI platforms: Google announced Gemini-powered features in Chrome, Microsoft has Copilot Mode in Edge, Firefox is integrating AI, Atlassian bought The Browser Company (maker of Dia), AI-native players like Perplexity are shipping “AI browsers,” and OpenAI has ex-Chrome engineers rumored to be building a browser of its own — with Safari conspicuously absent. Richard MacManus argues this isn’t incremental feature creep but a redefinition: traditional tab-and-link exploration is being replaced by agentic assistants that synthesize multi-page research, take actions, and present curated answers rather than raw sources. For the AI/ML community this matters on multiple fronts: product and UX paradigms are shifting from surfacing links to retrieval-augmented generation, multi-document summarization, and agent orchestration — all requiring robust grounding, citation, and hallucination mitigation. It raises engineering trade-offs around where models run (edge vs cloud), latency, context-window management, and privacy of browsing data, plus societal issues like reduced serendipity, personalization-driven filter bubbles, and new evaluation metrics for “good browsing.” The change creates opportunities for new models, RAG pipelines, on-device inference, and evaluation frameworks — but also urgent responsibilities around transparency, provenance, and aligning assistant behaviors with user learning and discovery.