The early days of the internet saw intense competition between graphical web browsers. Netscape Navigator faced off against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. No sooner had Explorer won that conflict than a new war for market share erupted between Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Google Chrome. This time Chrome emerged as the dominant player, with a market share that has been above 60% for most of the past decade, while the next closest rival, Apple’s Safari, has been stuck in the mid-teens.
But now, AI is shaking up the browser market, with companies beginning to incorporate new generative and agentic AI capabilities directly into the web navigation tool. That in turn is sparking a fierce new war for users, with Google Chrome, now enhanced with Google’s AI model Gemini, fighting upstarts like Perplexity, with its Comet AI browser, and battered veterans of past browser fights, like Opera, trying to get their mojo back with AI enhancements too.
On Tuesday, OpenAI also entered the fray with its new AI powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas. The new browser looks a lot like traditional ones such as Google Chrome, but puts ChatGPT at the center of the browsing experience and weaves AI into the user experience. OpenAI is also offering a paid agent mode of Atlas that can conduct searches on its own for users.
For nearly two decades, the basic browsing experience, aside from a few minor improvements, remained largely unchanged. Users typed a url in the navigation bar, or typed a search query in that same space—a feature that Opera first pioneered but which was soon copied by Google—and the browser takes the user to that web address or a search results page, which displays a list of links. Click on a link and the browser takes you to that web page.
