Will A.I. Eat The Browser?

By Om Malik

I’m addicted to Apple’s Vision Pro. It’s a nearly perfect entertainment device, serving as my ideal television. Sure, I would like it to be lighter. I so badly wish that its battery would last longer. And I wish Siri worked better on it, so that when I ask it a question about what I'm watching (say, how many home runs has Juan Soto has hit at Dodger Stadium?), it might present answers alongside the video feed from the Yankees game. Going to Safari to look up that information separately is a real pain. 

If the Vision Pro taught me anything, it’s that on a device designed for immersive experiences the Safari browser feels like an afterthought. In a world where AR, VR, and voice-controlled systems are becoming more integrated into daily life, the browser’s limitations become glaringly obvious. At this point, there is no way the Vision Pro is leaving my life, but I wouldn’t mind at all if my browser did.

For most of us, it’s hard to imagine life without an internet browser. But as AI disaggregates information from text, video, and music into unique remixable AI chatbot answer streams, it’s clear to me that over the next decade the browser will need to adapt or die.  

My first true web browser was Lynx. I used it way back in 1993, just after I signed up for The Pipeline, a New York-based service provider. It preceded Mosaic, which ultimately introduced the idea of a browser to the rest of us and was a stepping stone to the internet. Since then, various browsers — Netscape, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari — have been part of my life at one point or another. They have been the primary gateway to the internet, a universal tool to access and interact with information on the open web. They have helped shape how we consume information and transform multiple industries.

Looking back, it’s somewhat remarkable to realize that, whether it was Mosaic in 1994 or Chrome in 2024, these web browsers have had essentially the same interface, remaining more or less unchanged for decades. You can call up a web page by typing its address (or doing a quick search). You can save bookmarks. You can go forward and back. But just as the arrival of “Artificial Intelligence” is forcing everything in the technology stack — devices, operating systems, applications, cloud platforms, networks, and even chips — to quickly adapt and evolve, the browser also has to reinvent itself. It has to molt, shed its old skin, and mutate for this new world.

To understand why the browser is on the precipice of a monumental transformation, one has to go back in time to the origins of the internet. If you understand why the browser was created, then you can understand the arc of its growth and the need for change. In 1989, while working at CERN, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web (WWW) to fill a need for a simple platform to share information between scientists, universities, and other institutes. The web browser emerged as a response to make this easier. The web browser, thus, was originally designed around documents, and that premise has not changed. 

Most Americans first learned about the browser from an article by John Markoff, then a technology writer for The New York Times. Markoff’s article reflected hopeful, optimistic, and utopian ideas about the power of the network, encouraging readers to think of the browser as “a map to the buried treasures of the information age.”

“I wrote the story because Brian Reid at DEC told me that the significance of the web was that mid-career computer scientists would benefit because they could share academic papers with their colleagues quickly,” Markoff shared in an email. “It hasn’t changed very much from that original idea, though these days those pages are less academic, carry images, and are often used to stream videos.”

Ever since I saw the earliest versions of Humane’s AIPin, Snap’s AR glasses, and caught wind of what would become Apple’s Vision Pro, I have wondered about the durability of the browser. Just over two years ago, with the arrival of a user-friendly version of ChatGPT, everything fell into place.

I don’t expect these devices to dominate the world next year or the year after, but the journey has begun. And it’s already clear that many of these emerging devices are not like the computers we have used thus far. For starters, some of them won’t even have screens or keyboards. 

Secondly, with the rise of generative AI, we are starting to see atomization of web pages themselves. This in itself undermines the original premise of the web and how it has been built thus far. If there are no documents to connect, how does the browser do what it has done so far? (Bill Gross made a similar point in a conversation with Fred earlier this year. You can read Fred’s story on his new company on CrazyStupidTech.com.) 

More importantly, lost in the “AI” and “AGI” hype is the fact that the real breakthrough is the ability of large language models and related technologies to take data and create logical streams, generating text, video, or audio content. This is the fundamental advancement from an “information” standpoint. Even early (and recently developed) tools like NotebookLM (which creates audio from text) give us a directional view of the future.

For instance, a decade (or sooner) from now, a customer of AppleNews could ask it to create a curated morning news show featuring information from preselected sources and topics, and have a synthetically created influencer either read it to them or have them watch it on a future version of Vision Pro, or something akin to it.

None of this is science fiction -- you can pretty much do all of these things now, albeit poorly. In time, it won’t just be possible — it will be second nature. As such, it will be a big change in how the information ecosystem on the internet has worked so far. These new technologies give us an opportunity to have more personalized, dialog-centric control over the information.

Current apps require active user engagement. We must consciously track everything. We are always taking photos, or logging information and manually tracking calories, or checking ingredient lists, and researching nutrition facts when grocery shopping. The technical challenge isn't just building a better food database. It's creating seamless monitoring and intervention without requiring constant user input.

In the near future, you can imagine a non-human entity — let’s call it a DietBot — acting as your personal nutritionist and meal planner and requiring little to no effort on your part. This proverbial DietBot could analyze your eating patterns, health goals, and dietary restrictions in real-time, and thus match restaurants, or groceries. It could pre-screen options based on your specific needs, automatically flagging allergens, suggesting healthier alternatives, and adjusting portion recommendations based on your day's activities. 

While browsers are so ubiquitous that it may be hard to imagine life without them, the truth is that we humans have had to adapt to what has been a document-centric web experience. We have been forced to adapt to technological constraints, rather than technology truly adapting to human needs. 

The entire ecosystem of the web exists for monetization by large platforms, and — as people like Flipboard founder and CEO Mike McCue, who worked for Netscape during its heyday, will tell you, it has served this purpose quite well.

“Since the mid-90s, the web and the web browser have been exclusively focused on connecting and rendering content using open standards like HTML and HTTP,” he said. “This worked well for decades and fueled the rise of super valuable web-based businesses like Amazon, Airbnb, and many others.”

McCue believes that with protocols like ActivityPub, combined with AI, we can create a more personalized, mediated information experience. While he views AI interfaces like Claude and ChatGPT as a seismic shift, he believes that “you’ll always need some technical vehicle.” What will change is how that vehicle is used. Just as the browser evolved for a mobile-first world by contorting itself into apps, the personalized, interactive, dialogue-centric AI system will force the browser to evolve again. 

So, what might that evolution look like?

Josh Miller, co-founder of The Browser Company, is making “Arc,” a browser for the AI-first era. He believes that there is less of a need for the user interface of the browser of the past, but the internals of the browser are going to be pivotal for our future. “While most think we are building a browser,” Miller said in a conversation, “what we are building is a browser-based system.”

He wants to transform the browser from a mere viewer to an operating system-like entity that maintains personal preferences and behaviors at the system level, allowing us to use “AI” across devices without replicating our choices at the app level. His new browser-based OS will understand user context and preferences at a fundamental level, making it easier to create personalized experiences. Rather than having applications dictate how we interact with information, our usage patterns and preferences will shape how information and services are presented to us.

Miller believes the web browser’s core technologies, especially those that are open and widely adopted standards, make it easy for browsers to evolve quickly and adapt to a future where we will interact with multiple devices — not just desktop or laptop computers, or mobile phones. After all, wearables and devices without screens will need to browse, retrieve, and interact with information without the need for a browser as we know it.

Just as the iPhone positioned itself as a reinvention of the phone, the browser will go through a similar transition, Miller said. The transition however “will be gradual” and the current form of the browser “will actually be an important” part of that transition “almost as a way to bridge” people to the future and “let their guard down.” 

Miller’s optimism stems from the fact that the browser was able to metamorphose for mobile phones. Our mobile apps are essentially browsers with wrappers to perform specific tasks and make the internet more manageable and personalized. The next evolution might require a bit more contortion.

As VR, AR, audio interfaces, and chat become ever more central to our daily lives — and not just for Vision Pro addicts like myself, but for everyone — the web browser’s limitations are becoming increasingly apparent.  There is no doubt in my mind that the implications of this seismic change in what a browser does, and how it works, will be felt far and wide.