The next big browser is here

Back in January, I predicted that OpenAI's next big app would be a web browser. Well, their next big app was actually Sora, which I think sucks, but their browser, Atlas, is here today and I think this is the first AI-powered browser that has any chance of disrupting the Chrome dominance we've had for nearly 2 decades.

As you might expect, this is based on Chromium, and my extensions work great in it.Other than that, it's a pretty basic browser that has quick access to ChatGPT everywhere from an "Ask ChatGPT" button at the top right, just like all other AI browsers and Chrome, and your chat history always accessible from a slide-out sidebar. The new tab page is predictably a text box that intelligently does what you ask it to do, routing your queries to perform web searches, start a standard ChatGPT chat, or simply load a website from your bookmarks or history. You can, of course, also just paste in the URL and go.

The browser UI looks very nice, which is not surprising given the general quality of OpenAI's other apps.There are only top tabs, no side tabs option, which is a bit of a bummer, but something I can live with if the rest of the browsing experience is good enough. And yes, they have implemented command + C to copy the current URL, although there's no UI element telling you it worked, but I have confirmed it is there and works as you'd expect.

There are a couple of other nice features in the app. For example, the bookmarks bar below the address bar is hidden by default, but as soon as you save your first bookmark, it will be shown. You can hide it again if you want, but I think this is a smart way to handle this. There are several features that will reference your ChatGPT chat history as well as your browsing history when searching things in the app, and you're given the option to turn these on or off as you prefer. This is an explicit part of the setup process, so if you have no interest in that, you can simply say no, in which case most of the personalization will be completely off. There are plenty of settings in the app to control this after the fact as well.

In terms of customization, there isn't much here, although they do have a cool accent color picker that also has haptic feedback as you move from one color to the other. All this does is set a subtle hue to the window chrome, so it's not a big deal but is a nice touch. I'm also a big proponent of the "show full URL in address bar" feature in all browsers, and I'm happy to see this is here as well. It's a little thing, but I'm always worried it's on its way out.

The app does not have an agent mode as of yet, but it sounds like that will be coming in the relatively near future. My experience with these modes in other browsers has been a major letdown, so we'll see if OpenAI can do any better, but I'm not holding my breath here.

Atlas is currently available for the Mac, and you can download it for use with your ChatGPT account (no paid plan required).

Side note, the announcement video for this had someone screen sharing with a pending update. Honestly, the most authentic thing I've seen in a company demo video recently.