What Google Chrome Says About the Future of Web Browsing (Premium)

When Microsoft unleashed the AI era on us all in early 2023, it caught Google by surprise, and the online giant was slow to respond. Embarrassingly, its original retort to what we now call Microsoft Copilot was a disaster and it was described internally as "rushed, botched, and myopic." But Google quickly corrected, and like Microsoft, it initiated a quick rebranding of its initial AI offering, in Google's case, from Bard to Gemini. Today, it is clearly a player.

Whatever one's opinions of Gemini and Google's general AI strategy, there are some salient facts to consider.

First, Google was an early AI innovator--among other things, it literally invented the transformer architecture that forms the "T" in GPT--and so it has a longer and deeper experience with these technologies than any of its competitors.

Google has the dominant online search service, a crucial differentiator that's key to the success of any generative AI capabilities. It also has numerous consumer and business services with over one billion monthly active users (MAUs), giving it a Microsoft-like capability to integrate and bundle its AI into offerings that will immediately impact wide audiences.

Like Apple and Microsoft, Google makes its own web browser and uses it as a vector for distributing and promoting its other products and services, most notably search. But unlike those other companies, Google's browser is dominant on both desktop and mobile, and this dominance means we can't discount what it is that Google is doing in this space with AI.

Put simply, barring any antitrust invention--a remote possibility, but a possibility nonetheless--Google is ideally situated to continue or even grow its dominance across multiple products and services thanks to AI, and to establish Gemini, its in-house AI, as a dominant player in this new market. There's a lot of talk about how AI will siphon off Google Search users, but there is zero evidence of that happening so far.

Coincidental to all this, I've been thinking about how AI will revolutionize the web browser--our most important app on any personal computing platform--for the past few years. Progress so far has been slow, but I think that's tied to the dominant positions that Apple, Google, and Microsoft enjoy, as that typically triggers a defensive, conservative posture. Real innovation--and disruption--most often comes from smaller players who can move more aggressively because they have no market to protect.

And that's what we've seen so far. It started with subtle changes to browser UIs, with browsers both major and minor integrating one or more third-party models into AI services, usually through a sidebar. Then we saw the first real innovation and disruption with The Browser Company, which ran into a complexity wall with its first web browser, Arc, triggering a reset that would be unthinkable for a larger, more established browser maker. Opera has since announced an AI-first browser, which we've still not...