It seems like the Browser wars are back. And this time it’s the battle of the chatbots.

The modern day darling of ‘trying to mix up the browser’, The Browser Company of New York, struck an initial chord with Arc a few years back (it became my default browser for no other reason than it was prettier than Chrome), then a bit of a miss with Dia. That said, my new mac this week was the first that I didn’t download Chrome onto, choosing Dia this time round.

But I also dipped into Comet (Perplexity’s browser) — a free annual account courtesy Lenny’s newsletter was enough to tempt me.

Then yesterday, openAI announced chatGPT Atlas. I gave it a whirl.

First impressions

First of all, I quite like chatGPT Atlas. It doesn’t have the ‘profiles’ feature thaat Chrome, Dia et al have, which I would personally need to be my daily driver. But it’s really nicely executed, the shiny overlay when the browser is being automated by openAI is pretty, and it feels like a logical progression in the move up the stack to being the new front page of the internet.

But I found that by moving what I’ve always compartmentalised as a website (chatGPT) onto the browser layer, I felt a bit of cognitive dissonance that I hadn’t with Perplexity or Dia’s chats.

chatGPT is a browser? Or the browser is chatGPT?

You log in with chatGPT as soon as you fire up the browser, and as a result all your chats — basically your entire chat history — is right there, in your sidebar. That means also that every web search in Atlas that chatGPT deems to be ‘a chat’ turns up in chatGPT too.

I think I’m ok with this? I feel like my chatGPT sidebar is throwaway enough that I don’t mind filling it with random searches. But equally the Dia sidebar which doesn’t sync in that way feels nicely compartmentalised.

If I squint I can start to see the productivity gains from seamlessly moving from my memories in chatGPT to my browsing history and back — and this is a great v1. But right now. I dunno. Maybe it’s nicer to have different AIs that I talk to about different things. Gemini can improve my writing in Google docs, while Claude handles my conversations about code. Dia is my browsing assistant while chatGPT is my thought buddy.

Network effects tho

You can see why openAI wants to own every gate into the web. They’re squeezing the use cases of everyone dropping chat into their apps — both the front door (browser) and data layer (connectors).

OpenAI feels inevitable at this stage. The Thanos of the modern web. Their pace of shipping is out of this world even for the current breed of AI-first companies, and their brand name recognition feels like a won race already.

They even already have a relationship with Apple that may be deep pocketed enough to assert dominance over Google’s (paid) placement as default search on Safari. Perhaps Microsoft are the only company with the distribution to compete.

So it wouldn’t surprise me if in 2 years time chatGPT browser will be my new default install, on mac, iPhone, and everywhere else. This makes me a bit sad as I have a definite side-eye feeling about Sama and team.

But hey. If my chatbot knows about my search history, maybe it’s worth it.