AI Heats Up the Browser Wars

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There hasn't been much spice in the browser wars for awhile, but AI may have kicked things up a notch. You have Perplexity's Comet and The Browser Company's Dia integrating AI directly into the browser allowing direct interaction with your tabs or browser take overs which proposes some new browser use cases, and also some potential security threats.

📰 Article 
Google Dodges Worst Penalties in U.S. Antitrust Case 
Starting off with the incumbent leader, Google, avoided being ordered to sell off Chrome. In part because of the fresh market competition imposed by AI tools cutting into the search and potentially browser leads. The judge decided to let the market do its work.

📰 Article
Atlassian agrees to acquire The Browser Co. for $610 million
Meanwhile The Browser Company, that made their name within the development community for their Arc browser, and its eventual shutdown was bought by Atlassian. They currently have their AI powered follow-up to Arc in beta with their Dia browser. It'll be interesting to see how Atlassian integrates Dia or if they let it die a slow, quiet death within their platform.

📰 Article
PayPal and Venmo are giving out Comet invites and free Perplexity Pro subscriptions
If you have a PayPal or Venmo account you can get a free year of Perplexity Pro which will get you an invite to try out their Comet browser. I've been having some fun with this one. A favorite use case is summing up the comments on Hacker News posts. Unsurprisingly they weren't huge fans of that Atlassian / TBC deal.

🎧 Listen
AI Browsers, 100X Build Speed, Massive Svelte Update
Syntax.fm touched briefly on Perplexity's Comet which is what drove me to initially get an invite the old-fashioned way...DMing strangers on Reddit. They hit Perplexity at about the 37 minute mark, but also have a rundown of Amazon's Kiro coding tool which is worth checking out.

📰 Article 
"Scamlexity"
Agentic browsers and sending AI to make purchases for you is a use case that's coming. I'm not sure if people are clamoring for this. I still want oversight into my purchases. Guardio put agentic browsers to the test and found they're easy to trick into buying fake products. Keep your head on a swivel out there people and maybe don't give AI your credit card details.

Thanks for reading.