So Open AI have just brought out their own AI powered browser
just months after Perplexity brought theirs out.
Many people online have tried to claim that this is the start of
a new browser war or that Google is suddenly going to get
dethroned. And we actually saw a huge
amount, billions in fact, of their value as a company
collapse in the space of just 48 hours.
As always, there's been lots of hype with this new release and
in today's episode I'm going to break down what I really think
about it and why I do not think this browser is going to take on
Google. This is in the loop with Jack
Horton. I hope you enjoy the show.
So as the title and intro I think of this episode explains,
I don't actually think Open a Eyes browser called Atlas or the
Perplexity browser is going to dethrone Chrome.
You know, I don't think it's going to capture even 20% of the
market. And I may look back in six, 1218
months, three years and eat my words, but I don't even think
it's going to become part of most people's process or daily
workflows. But in many ways, I also think
that's the wrong way of looking at it.
And it's definitely the wrong question because I don't think
that question should be, is this going to be Chrome?
I think the more useful question is, does Atlas solve specific
problems we have today? And I guess what can you learn
about testing it? So when that was launched just
over a week ago, Google's stock price plummeted.
It closed about 2% down overall. At one point, it dropped by
4.8%. You know, some people just made
a lot of money very quickly if they bought at the dip.
But that's roughly $18 billion in market value that just
vanished overnight. And, you know, headlines have
been talking about the return of the browser wars, but within 48
hours, it's been confirmed by TechCrunch and many others that
Atlas is actually built on Chronium, which is Google's open
source infrastructure for building web browsers.
I'll get into why I think this is really important in more
depth throughout the episode, but it just shows, I don't think
Open AI is even competing with Chrome at an infrastructure
level. They're trying to build this new
interface into the Internet. So before we really get into the
the meat and potatoes of the discussion today, I think it's
worth summarising what Atlas is, what they're doing differently,
whether or not you should even pay any attention.
So when this was actually launched, Sam Altman described
Atlas as basically representing this like Rare wants in a
decade, opportunity to rethink what browsers could ultimately
be. And the actual product itself
centres on really 2 main capabilities and features, which
is context aware Chat Chi BT integration and it's agent mode.
So that context aware piece basically means that Chat Chi BT
lives in the sidebar of Atlas, which is very similar to what
Perplexes did with their browser called Comet.
And it essentially means that as you speak to Chat Chi BT in this
sidebar, it understands what's on the screen and I guess it
understands the context of what you're talking about.
So essentially it's just removing the need to copy and
paste. So if you're looking at a web
page and you say and ask a question, it already knows what
you're referring to on that web page.
So it's not entirely new technology.
As I said, Perplexity launched it in July, which has many
similar features. But the integration with ChatGPT
obviously means that that browser Atlas is now in the
hands of potentially 800 million users because that's how many
people use Open AI's ChatGPT every single week.
Now, Agent mode is where things could get both interesting, but
for me, I found quite challenging open air.
I tried to pitch it as ChatGPT, being able to take actions on
your behalf inside the browser. And the examples they included
are kind of like go do my shopping or adding recipe
ingredients to a cart or placing specific orders for specific
things or researching competitors and compelling
insights and putting them into a document.
You know, and there's a lot of mixed results from people online
and early testers and definitely from myself.
For example, one security researcher called Simon
Williamson wrote that actually watching agent mode A felt like
watching a toddler try and use a computer for the same first
time, but actually realized that you could very easily inject
prompts and sabotage the browser and the agent whilst it's
performing tasks. So it's actually a big security
concern. Also there's many reports on how
it's just incredibly slow, it gets stuck in loops and
sometimes just fails at very simple tasks that would have
taken a human less than 30 seconds to complete themselves.
And that's definitely been my experience.
I've not really been a fan of it to be honest so far.
I hope it gets better because it definitely represents some
really cool ideas. But as I've said in previous
episodes, it taking control of the screen just feels a little
bit pointless when you just use APIs.
So transferring data behind the scenes for you between agents,
it's just quicker. It's the type of experience that
I look for. Not this, you know, clunky
browser that pops up with an agent confused trying to
navigate websites. But that that's quite a
pessimistic view on this new capability.
Of course, they've also added a memory feature Atlas.
So the Browser Atlas now starts to track your browsing behaviour
and of course, build up more context over time.
And according to Open AI, this will enable you to search and
say, find all the job postings I looked at last week or summarize
all the industry trends and reports that I've been reading
over the past month. And obviously that means it's
just very personalized and the trade off obviously being
massive privacy implications. I know I've said this again and
I keep on saying it. I have a tinfoil hat at times
and I'm going to put it on when ChatGPT is using my conversation
history, some of which might be private.
It's using it's memory about all the things that I've talked
about. It's maybe using context I
provided to it in the form of files and documents.
I don't want it to use that to sell more things to me and
advertise more things to me, to be honest.
Now, if we actually then look at what's working with today's
early users. So the context aware assistance
definitely helps with some things.
I've definitely enjoyed using it in some tasks.
Now it's only available for Mac users.
So sorry everyone that's on Windows.
Windows is rubbish anyway. So, you know, it's a, it's a
lesson there, but there's been lots of people on Twitter
basically getting Atlas to help with improving landing pages,
suggesting improved thumbnails or without kind of switching
context. So just setting it a task in the
browser and it going doing it. Another Twitter user called Raza
Martin actually compared both Atlas from Open AI and Comet
from Perplexity on specific tasks such as tracking her
daughter's school assignments across many different classes
and apparently reported that Atlas completed it much more
accurately whilst Comet really struggled.
Now, I do recommend you guys go test it.
And if you're going to go test it, I'd approach it somewhat
systematically. It's quite a big ask to change
browsers actually. It's a weird one.
It's like trying to change mobile phone providers.
There's definitely a, for me, a resistance to doing it.
I'm so used to using certain things over others, even as
somebody that's quite an early adopter of new technologies.
But if you do want to test it, I'd recommend trying it for a
few days to maybe a week and trying to focus on specific
things that you would use that context aware sidebar for.
So without touching agent mode, you know, draft social media
posts using this information, IE the web page or, or use this
page to write a summary e-mail and send it to John or improve
my presentation that I'm working on right now.
You could also maybe use it for learning, you know, on YouTube,
you can ask questions about what's on the YouTube video.
You could ask clarifying questions about what you're
reading without obviously having to explain or put web pages and
provide any context. And then obviously later I'd
recommend trying agents probably for low friction or quite simple
tasks. So form filling basic research
asks like find the top five articles about X, maybe maybe
some form of data collection across different websites or
simple comparisons. And you want to be watching for
how quickly the agent can complete that task versus you
just doing it yourself. So yeah, have a test of it and
trying to take away learnings about a, the future direction of
this space, but also whether you can imagine users not using this
on a a day-to-day basis Anyway, now we're going to I
guess what ChatGPT is the new features and capabilities.
Let's spend a minute discussing, I guess that strategic context
about because I think understanding why Atlas exists
and I guess the constraint it's going to have to operate under
will give us quite a good indication about how successful
it is. And you'll probably start to see
why I think what I think around open AI not becoming the go to
browser and dethroning Chrome. So from a technical point of
view, Cronium, so the infrastructure provided and
built by Google to allow other companies to build web browsers,
that's Cronium powers about 83% of global browsers as of 2025 S
Atlas runs on Cronium, so does Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc.
The exceptions are literally only Safari, which has 16%
market share and Firefox at 2.37% market share.
Well, I think it's quite interesting is that Open AI have
hired Ben Guja as Atlas's head of engineering.
And for context of why this is important, Guja built Firefox at
Mozilla and then Chrome at Google.
So his third big browser project, he chose to build
Chrome on top of Cronium. So Google's open source
infrastructure for building new web browsers rather than
creating a new engine. You know, even Microsoft
couldn't justify fighting this fight.
They spent many years developing what's called Edge HTML, which
is, I guess, their own proprietary browser
infrastructure. And you can guess what happened
in in December 2018, Microsoft announced they were giving up on
the Edge HTML project and switching to Chronium.
And by January 2020, that transition is done.
So that's one of the biggest, wealthiest technology providers
in the world with almost unlimited resources, really
looked at that competitive landscape and say we're not
really going to invest here. We don't think we can win.
You know, building a browser engine is difficult and very
expensive and arguably difficult to have any real IP or
competitive advantage by owning that infrastructure layer.
You have to build rendering pipelines, JavaScript
interpreters in preventing thousands and many thousands of
web standards, handling security updates, maintaining,
maintaining compatibility across different devices and our
operating systems. You know, the cost is just
astronomical and the use cases that you have to get right is
also astronomical. And Microsoft, obviously the
Marfan for there's no point doing this.
Now coming back to Ben Gudger and why I think this is
especially interesting on top of the fact that he chose to use
Cronium. Now there are many different
ways to interpret this decision. One perspective might be that
building a browser from or browser infrastructure from
scratch would require hundreds of millions of dollars in years
development and deliver very limited additional value to any
users. But by building on Chronium,
Open AI can just focus on the AI integration, which is the actual
innovation here and that's arguably smart resource
allocation. Another perspective is that it
creates a big structural dependency on Google's
infrastructure. Well, really just trying to
compete at an application layer. Every Cronium update would
favour Chrome, which obviously is a massive strategic
vulnerability. And I think both perspectives
capture something real and important.
And the real question is which dynamic will prove more
important to success. You know, And I think it was
definitely an argument to say that Open AI financial situation
is a driver here because Open AI are going to lose $44 billion
between now and 2029 before maybe reaching profitability.
And only about 5% of their 800 million users actually pay for
subscriptions. And some Altman in a Fortune
interview actually acknowledge that they're losing money on a
$200 a month Pro subscription because the amount of usage
exceeds their initial projections.
So another interpretation is that Open AI is investing very
heavily in its growth phase, similar to how Amazon operated
at a loss for years and Uber and many big companies.
And obviously therefore Atlas could be a very clever
distribution strategy to 800 million users.
But you could also argue that the amount of financial pressure
on open AI is leading to strategies which are a bit
pointless. A good example of this is Sam
Altman described advertising as a complete last resort at a
Harvard Business School interview in May 2024.
Yet by 2025 of this year, he's been telling structures.
So an advertising media platform led by someone called Ben
Thompson saying that he loves Instagram ads.
An ad week reported that Open AI hired one of Google's ex head of
search advertising as the VP in May 2025.
And apparently Open AI targeting about $1 billion in advertising
revenue by 2026. Maybe this just shows that
they're burning so much cash, they're maybe pivoting to other
revenue models to cover costs. It wouldn't be that surprising.
As a consumer platform scales, it often adds advertising
revenues to its business model. And time will tell which
interpretation matters. But also there are some points
on data collection and context capturing that maybe highlight
why they've done this as well. You know, the Perplexity CEO has
said very explicitly that the reason that AI companies are
producing browsers is because they want more context and data
on you because they want to know what hotels you're buying, what
restaurants are going to, what you look at on the Internet
because it tells them more about you and they say to personalized
interactions. And it coming down to the killer
point of why I don't think they can be that successful is just
looking at that market structure.
The fact that Chrome has almost 70% of market share and the
companies that Google are competing with are basically in
Google's pocket. You know, Safari has about 16%
mainly because they own iPhones and Firefox has 2.45%.
And we watch Firefox go from about 31% of market share in
2009 to 2.3% now. Google has invested very
cleverly in bundling Chrome into all Android devices and
throughout the Google ecosystem, they've obviously put huge
amounts of investment into Chrome itself.
Google also pays 10's and 10s of billions of dollars to Apple to
have Chrome on every single device.
And up to 70% of Firefox's revenue is coming from Google to
use Google services. And even Microsoft, who've got
lots of Enterprise Products, lots of bundling of Edge into
Windows products, lots of marketing, they've only reached
about 5% after years of trying hard.
Now, this seems very doom and gloom because I do think that
Atlas could have maybe 1 to 4% market share, which you could
say seems very small. But that's about 25 to 100
million users. And by many metrics, that's a
successful product. So yeah, maybe it becomes a
specialized tool for 100 million people around the world.
Maybe it doesn't, but they've got a massive distribution
advantage because they've got 800 million weekly active users
there and converting just a few percent would put them into 10's
and 10s of millions of users, which they could monetize and
generate 10s of millions or billions of dollars.
Now I find it quite depressing. I wish we were moving away from
an advertising model. It seems that it's creeping back
as per usual. But anyway, let's pull this
together. I think open our eyes Atlas
browser is unlikely, as I said, to achieve this revolutionary
market transformation. I think mainly because I think
just market dynamics, historical precedent, many structural
constraints all point towards that outcome.
But I don't think that means it's not worth engaging with
market share and individual utility.
I think two different things. Maybe Atlas serves up to 100
million users and has and becomes a niche product.
Maybe it doesn't. But for you as an individual,
market outcome shouldn't really matter too much.
What matters is whether Atlas solves a pain point that you
have today more than your current setup.
And the only way to learn and find that out is to go test.
So give it one to two to three weeks of testing and see what
you think. Anyway, that's it for today.
I hope you enjoyed the episode and I'll see you next week.