Web Browsers, Agentic AI, and the Future (Premium)

I can't stop thinking about web browsers. Smaller web browser makers are starting to innovate in unique ways ahead of bigger changes that might occur thanks to AI. This work is overdue, I think. It's not like we nailed the web browser UI in the 1990s and then never needed to make significant changes to it over the intervening 25+ years, despite all the changes happening around these apps in personal computing during this time. But the future is elusive. It's not clear what's next.

What is clear is the past. I made the case in my Programming Windows series, which became the book Windows Everywhere, that the decline of Windows can be tied directly to Microsoft's mistake in reversing its decision to fully embrace the web. And it is not coincidental that Apple today is taking a similar protectionist stand with iOS and the iPhone in trying to kneecap not just competing web browsers, but also the cross-platform app platform and extensibility they would otherwise support.

But web browsers will not be ignored. They are the most popular and most often used app across desktop and mobile. They are now a conduit for AI-based services. And they are the one app, the one interface, that works everywhere and is common to some degree across platforms. Today, we seem poised on a precipice of long overdue change.

Sort of. Steven Wright told a joke in the 1980s that perfectly encompasses how I view this situation today.
"You know when you're sitting on a chair and you lean back so you're just on two legs. and then you lean too far so you almost fall over, but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time."
Yes. That.

So where is this all heading?
? Step into our agentic future
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once described Copilot as being "like the Start button" in Windows, in that it would "become the orchestrator of all your app experiences." We naturally associated Copilot specifically with Windows at that time, as this was when Microsoft announced it was adding a Copilot app to Windows 11, after all. But the ways we'll use AIs like Copilot extend far beyond Windows apps and PCs. More to the point, Nadella was purposefully comparing this future interface to the app launching system for which Microsoft is still most famous. But the "apps" that Copilot will orchestrate will more commonly be what I think of as online services, and Copilot as an interface is something that needs to be available everywhere, not just on PCs.

More recently, Microsoft has described "the second wave" of Copilot advances as agentic, meaning that its AI can be configured to work autonomously on your behalf to complete tasks. And not just tasks, but complex multistep tasks that might require it to interact with multiple online services and apps.

This is orchestration writ large. At a high level, an operating system on a PC, server, or mobile device abstracts the hardware for developers, and it provides an interface for interacting with the apps...