AI in Browsers: Features and Opportunities

Microsoft Edge and Opera Are Leading the Way in Browser AI Features

Web browsers are an essential part of the Internet stack, a truly General Purpose application, employed for Consumer and Business use cases alike, and present across all types of devices and operating systems. They connect to Internet servers, retrieve HTML and JavaScript files, and render them visually, for the user to scroll, click and navigate according to her needs.

Modern browsers have smart location bars, that search through stored history items, bookmarks and open tabs, as well as sharing features that send URLs to other browser instances on other of the user’s devices. An often over-looked and less visible, but critical task of these applications, is to protect the personal user data they store on the client from attempts to steal it and from sharing it too broadly without explicit user consent with 3rd-parties.

The core browser Jobs To Be Done are:

• Discovery of websites and web resources

• Remembering addresses it visited and going back to favourite places

• Storage and management of website log-ins and other form data

• Syncing of data across devices and sharing it at the user request with other people

Adjacent services and tools that are integrated in most modern browsers include:

• Virtual Private Networks

• Web search and translation

• Generation of email addresses and passwords

• PDF display and editing

Browsers are built on top of 1st-party or 3rd-party rendering engines. The main ones in the market are Apple’s Webkit (to power Safari), Google’s Blink (a fork of Webkit, that powers Chrome) and Mozilla’s Gecko engine (that powers Firefox). Microsoft Edge and the Opera browser are built on top of Blink.

AI represents both an opportunity and a threat for browser providers, as Natural Language assistants, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Pi, provide convenient and fast answers to user queries that would, otherwise, require navigating to multiple websites and Internet resources. Example use cases include researching travel destinations and planning vacations, collecting and comparing recipes, education and looking up information about a wide variety of topics.

To take advantage of the opportunity, browser makers can integrate and build features with and on top of AI capabilities, both in the user interface and as part of the web technology stack. Microsoft, Opera and Mozilla are three providers who have recently announced features and investments in this direction. This is an overview of the browser market, the AI developments in it, and directions in which this space can evolve.

Disclaimer: Writing this article brought me back to the 10 years I worked at Mozilla Firefox, improving the browser and adjacent products and services for users worldwide.

Browser Market Share: A Decade of Change

StatsCounter measures worldwide browser marketshare of page views, which can be segmented by platform (desktop, mobile) and regionally.

In January 2014, Chrome dominated the PC browser market with a 46.6% share, followed by Firefox (20.3%), Safari (5%), and Opera (1.3%). Fast forward to January 2024, Chrome has further solidified its position, commanding a 64.8% share, followed by Edge, with 12.8%, and Firefox, which has declined to 7.6% of the market worldwide. Safari and Opera have also seen growth, reaching 8.7% and 3.3%, respectively.

The mobile browser landscape in 2014 was led by Safari with a 32% share, followed by Opera (11.8%) and Chrome (8.4%). A decade later, in January 2024, Chrome has leapt to the forefront with a 64.1% share, while Safari holds a significant 25.6%. Opera and Firefox have diminished to 2.05% and 0.5%, respectively, with Edge barely making an impact at 0.3%.

During the past 10 years, the addressable market for browsers increased by 80%, from 3 billion Internet users in 2014, to 5.4 billion in 2023, according to ITU.

For a relatively commoditized category like browsers, distribution and integration with the rest of the value chain are important factors for success. The key drivers for the shift in competitive dynamics in the last decade are:

• Chrome’s growth on desktop can be attributed to its seamless integration with Google's ecosystem, speed, and user-friendly interface.

• Microsoft's strategy to integrate Edge with Windows 10 and its subsequent versions has been a key factor in its growth.

• The dramatic shift in the mobile browser market is largely due to the increasing dominance of Android devices, which typically come pre-installed with Chrome.

Microsoft Edge and Opera Are Leading the Way

Two weeks ago, Microsoft Edge re-branded itself as “the AI-powered browser”, powered by Copilot, which is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Dall-E 3 models.

Key features include:

• Natural language answers to complex questions

• Suggestions for related searches and links to the sources that it used to generate the answer

• Text generation, including personalization options, such as tone, format and length

• Image generation with DALL-E 3

• Translation

• Support for voice input on iOS

• Plug-ins, such as Instacart, Klarna, Kayak

This is likely just the beginning of AI integration into Edge, as this new technology and the new user experience it enables represent a major opportunity for Microsoft to capture more market and mind share, especially for consumer use cases.

Opera Aria

Opera, with headquarters in Norway, has recently introduced Aria, the free browser AI assistant for its applications on all platforms. Built on top of several LLMs, including some from Open AI and Google, Aria focuses on text and image generation. Its features include:

• Question answering and text, code and image generation with real-time access to the web

• Compose, reuse and rephrase text based on various characteristics, such as tone, length and format

• Color highlights for faster text skimming

• Chat history

Opera is a highly differentiated browser, with unique features such as an integrated messenger, a music player accessible from the sidebar and a pinboard tool. Historically, Opera’s strength has been on mobile devices, but AI innovation is a great opportunity for the company to make strides on PCs, too.

The Other Browsers

Chrome has been rumored to prepare features that integrate one or more of Google’s foundation models into the browser, but nothing has been announced yet.

Apple is also likely to build AI integrations in Safari and release new features, but hasn’t yet.

Mozilla has announced that it is investing significantly in AI, both for Firefox, as well as in a start-up and community dedicated to trustworthy and open source AI.

Other providers who could delight us with innovative, AI-based tools into their browsers are: Arc, DuckDuckGo and Brave.

The Future

For product categories with limited user awareness and competitive differentiation, such as browser, new technologies or use cases represent the best opportunity to diversify the field and create new types of user value that will then drive adoption and market share.

ChatGPT and numerous other AI-based tools are being built for the web, and also as native iOS, Android or Windows applications. Like browsers, these tools will be used both for consumer, personal use cases and business productivity, in the Enterprise.

Current solutions do not use the browser data stored in the app, such as history, bookmarks, open tabs and long-ins, but more advanced and powerful AI features could leverage this user information in a safe and private way for a more personalized experience.

Here are questions that will drive the future of this space in the short- and medium-term:

• Will innovative AI integrations into the browser interface shift the current market share dynamics?

• How can a browser-based AI assistant integrate user data on their history, bookmarks and log-ins to provide a superior web experience?

• Is the emergence of AI going to erode or grow the use and revenue potential of web technologies and the web stack?

• What is the optimal business model for browser AI-based features?

If you have comments or insight into the answers to these questions, let me know!