Look, Another AI Browser

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Reaction to “AI Browsers”

  • Many see Atlas/Comet/Dia/etc. as “Chromium with AI on top” and find that underwhelming or pointless.
  • Negativity is driven by fatigue with LLMs being bolted onto everything and skepticism that this adds real user value.
  • Some argue the critique is lazy: a browser with persistent, local, personalized memory that follows all interactions could be fundamentally new, even if built on Chromium.
  • A minority is genuinely interested in a Chrome-like browser more tightly integrated with ChatGPT, since that already dominates their browser usage.

Privacy, Profiling, and Scraping Concerns

  • Strong worry that an AI browser tracks every word read and action taken, building deep behavioral profiles attractive to advertisers, data brokers, and governments.
  • Speculation that such browsers can circumvent AI-crawler blocks by piggybacking on user sessions, effectively turning users into residential proxies.
  • Reports that the browser reuses popular Chrome user agents and is hard to distinguish or block.
  • Fear that users’ connections could become exit nodes for large-scale scraping or bot traffic.

Chromium Monoculture and Browser Innovation

  • Repeated frustration that “new browsers” are just skins over Chromium; people feel the browser ecosystem is effectively down to Chromium/Blink and Gecko, plus WebKit on Apple devices.
  • Some defend this as sensible: rolling a rendering engine from scratch is massively complex and risky; Chromium is like “Linux for browsers.”
  • Others argue this cements Google’s control (Manifest V3, Web Environment Integrity) and that lipstick on Chromium doesn’t solve monopoly or enshittification problems.
  • Projects like Ladybird and Servo are cited as rare, truly new engines; they’re seen as more exciting than yet another Chromium variant.

What Users Actually Want from Browsers

  • Many say the killer feature is still robust ad-blocking (especially uBlock Origin); a browser without extensions is seen as unusable.
  • Desired directions for a genuinely new browser:
    • Performance and low resource use.
    • Simpler, text‑first web rendering; minimal JS by default.
    • Powerful customization, scripting, advanced bookmarking/history, snapshots, annotations, and automation (e.g., bulk saving, monitoring site changes).
    • Better interoperability and protocols (e.g., Gemini support), not proprietary platforms.

OpenAI’s Strategy, AGI, and Monetization

  • Some think the browser is a strategic “Trojan horse”: control the user interaction gateway to gain context, traffic, and ad/commerce data.
  • It’s seen as another channel to monetize free users (potentially via ads) and to gather “computer use trajectory data.”
  • Commenters question whether OpenAI behaves like a company that truly believes it’s near AGI; actions look more like standard platform and ad-business building.
  • Debate over OpenAI’s actual research contributions versus firms like Google; some argue genuine breakthroughs, others see mostly commercialization of existing ideas.

Broader Tech Cynicism

  • Many tie AI browsers into a pattern: once-promising tech platforms (search, social, retail, OSes) becoming ad-tech and “enshittified.”
  • There’s a sense that what used to take decades to turn extractive now happens almost immediately.
  • Some express nostalgia for a time when new tech didn’t immediately evoke worst‑case surveillance and rent‑seeking scenarios.