The early days of the internet saw intense competition between graphical web browsers: Netscape Navigator faced off against Microsoft\u2019s Internet Explorer. No sooner had Explorer won that conflict than a new war for marketshare erupted between Explorer, Mozilla\u2019s Firefox, and Google Chrome. This time Chrome emerged as the dominant player, with a marketshare that has been above 60% for most of the past decade, while the next closest rival, Apple\u2019s Safari, has been stuck in the mid-teens.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2014a feature that Opera first pioneered but which was soon copied by Google\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n
Now, tech companies are betting that users want a new kind of experience: a browser that can answer questions, not just provide a list of links, and that can do far more than just navigate a user to a web page\u2014one that can perform tasks for the user on that page, such as booking travel or completing a purchase.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is probably the biggest shift since we\u2019ve seen the browser itself become the gateway to the internet. For 30 years, the browser was about navigation. Type, click, explore. Now, with AI, it\u2019s changing the model completely. It\u2019s moving from browsing to delegating,\u201d George Chalhoub, assistant professor at UCL Interaction Centre, told Fortune.<\/p>\n
Tech companies, including Perplexity and Opera, have already launched agentic AI browsers that can perform tasks on behalf of users. Perplexity\u2019s Comet combines a web browser with a built-in AI agent that can read pages, summarize information, and even perform multi-step actions, such as booking appointments or sending emails. Similarly, Opera\u2019s Neon introduces features like \u201cDo,\u201d which can carry out actions on a user\u2019s behalf, and \u201cCards,\u201d which store custom workflows and prompts for repeated use.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe browser wars are starting and the competition is heating up because browsers today are the operating system of your applications,\u201d Krystian Kolondra, EVP Browsers at Opera, told Fortune. \u201cThe browser world is extremely important because it is more aware than the operating system itself about what\u2019s happening on your pages.\u201d<\/p>\n
The vision for AI-powered browsing reframes the traditional browser as not just a tool for access, but as the primary interface through which AI agents operate.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole notion of search changed. It\u2019s not to point to the place where you can find your answer or do your thing, but to give you that answer and do that thing,\u201d Himanshu Tyagi, co-founder of the open-source AI company Sentent, said. \u201cWe are moving to sort of a dark internet, in the sense that it\u2019s not meant for just humans. It\u2019s meant for bots to consume and process information. Bots do things and give humans the final thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the third round of browser wars is already underway, the battlefield looks very different from the days when the main axes of competition were things like speed and tab management. This time, it\u2019s about which company can deliver the most seamless AI-powered experience while navigating heightened privacy issues and convincing users to change long-established habits. While major players like Google<\/a> still dominate, nimble newcomers are testing the limits of what a browser can do.<\/p>\n The third browser wars<\/p>\n The second round of browser wars concluded with Google Chrome\u2019s dominance, mostly due to its speed and integration with the wider Google ecosystem. Most browsers are now also underpinned by Chromium, a free and open-source web browser project, which was primarily developed and maintained by Google. Chromium is essentially a back-end system that determines how a browser goes out to find a particular web address, using an index of web pages Google maintains, and how it renders that web page.<\/p>\n While Google still dominates the search market and has taken steps to integrate AI into the search experience, its market share has been slipping. According to analysts at Third Bridge,<\/a> in July, Google\u2019s global search market share dropped below 90% for the first time in 10 years. <\/p>\n This could be due to the increased popularity of AI search engines like Perplexity or competition from AI chatbots like OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, which launched its own Search tool in October last year. In a survey from brokerage firm Evercore ISI conducted last year,<\/a> ChatGPT respondents saying ChatGPT was their top search provider increased to 5% from 1% four months prior.<\/p>\n That said, the popularity of Chome as a browser has not noticeably declined. While people may be sending their search queries to ChatGPT or Perplexity, when they use those services on desktop, they are mostly still using a tab in Chrome to do so. <\/p>\n And given the technical complexity and cost of building a browser from scratch, most AI companies are unlikely to develop their own back-end web indexing. Nearly every \u201cAI browser\u201d on the market today, including Perplexity\u2019s Comet, is built on Chromium.<\/p>\n Building a browser entirely from scratch is complex and resource-heavy. To do so, a company would have to recreate everything from how web pages are rendered and memory is managed, to encryption systems, sandboxing, video playback, and constant security patching. Even Microsoft<\/a>, once Google\u2019s fiercest rival in the browser space, eventually abandoned its own engine and rebuilt Edge on Chromium.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s literally reinventing the wheel,\u201d Chalhoub said. \u201cI don\u2019t see any company building its browser from scratch.\u201d<\/p>\n A unified interface<\/p>\n But why are AI companies so keen to have a browser of their own? Perplexity, for example, raised eyebrows<\/a> earlier this year when it made an unsolicited cash offer of $34.5 billion for Google Chrome. <\/p>\n