The pros and cons of AI-powered browsers

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A race between tech giants is unfolding before our very eyes. Who’ll be the first to transform the browser into an AI assistant app? As you test these new products, be sure to consider their enormous impact on security and privacy.
 
Whether superintelligent AI arrives by 2027 is anyone’s guess. However, the forecast for 2026 is already clear: the year will be defined by easily accessible AI agents — large multimodal models capable of building and executing a chain of actions based on user commands. Agentic features are already available on the ChatGPT website and from other providers, but achieving maximum performance requires these agents to execute actions directly on the user’s computer rather than in the cloud. The ideal solution would probably be an AI-powered OS, but creating a new operating system is a challenge. Because of this, all minds are focused on a user-friendly and effective alternative: the AI browser. And by that we mean a regular web-browsing application with a deeply integrated LLM. The AI model can view all open web pages, process information from them, and issue the same commands a user typically would, such as opening, clicking, entering data, saving, and downloading.

The market leaders all see the value of this solution. For instance, Perplexity has released its own Comet Browser and recently made a multi-billion-dollar bid to buy Chrome, while OpenAI has started developing its own browser. Google and Microsoft are in a better position, integrating Gemini and Copilot into their existing Chrome and Edge browsers, respectively. Meanwhile, Mozilla is approaching the same goal from a different angle: gradually integrating AI features deeply into its Firefox browser.

As a result, you’re already seeing ads encouraging you to “upgrade your browser” by either downloading the latest version, or activating “smart features” in your current one. Next year, they’ll be wall to wall. The only thing left to decide will be why you need all this, and whether the benefits are worth the emerging risks.

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