There's an explosion of AI-assisted browsers, but I think it's a dead end.

Why is it happening?

First, It's never been easier to fork Chromium.

Also, it's becoming more clear that owning the context will matter, to make LLMs maximally useful for a given user.

The cookie jar is an obvious, highly distilled source of context.

But if you actually look inside your cookie jar and what you'll find is a bunch of junk.

The reason the cookie jar is useful is because the thing that controls it can navigate the web and interact with sites on the user's behalf.

But that's fundamentally dangerous because it could take irrevocable actions on the user's behalf accidentally, or be tricked into doing so.

That kind of experience is safe if users never log into anything and it's some anonymous generic user clicking around.

But that makes them orders of magnitude less powerful.^[bl]

I think the thing that integrates LLMs into user's lives will take a different form.