Google essentially won the browser wars in the early 2000s with Chrome. At the same time, Microsoft held onto a significant market share with its now-dead Internet Explorer browser simply because of the massive number of Windows desktops that came with it installed.
Chrome makes up over 70 percent of browsers used, with all the rest lumped into that 30 percent. Even Apple’s Safari, which comes preinstalled as the default on every iPhone, iPad, and Mac, isn’t close.
But there’s a new browser war heating up: AI browsers. And for the first time in 20 years, it looks like Google Chrome could have some actual competition.
a burst of new arrivals
What distinguishes an AI browser is that its AI is built into the browser itself, effectively spreading across every website and allowing it to perform tasks across multiple sites automatically.
For example, you ask it to research the best of a specific type of product for you, tell you about it, and then place the order for you. That would require several steps in a traditional browser, even if you had ChatGPT or another AI open in one tab. An AI browser sweeps away those separate steps from your workload.
You can also optionally turn on “learning” for some of them, whereby the browser learns from your past behavior to tailor suggestions to you in the future. These “memories” inform the browser what kinds of information you seek and don’t seek, what types of products you like and don’t like.
Perplexity’s Comet was the first to strike in July 2025, incorporating the Perplexity AI as a core feature woven throughout the browser. Perplexity differs from competing generative AIs, such as ChatGPT, in that it acts more like a search engine than a chatbot, to begin with.
Then Opera debuted the Neon browser, and OpenAI, which began this whole scrum when it released ChatGPT to the masses in 2022, debuted Atlas. Both browsers are built around AI, like Comet, unlike AI extensions and plug-ins for existing legacy browsers that cobble together some functionalities but don’t tie them all together.
The Mozilla Foundation has taken a different tack, introducing an AI window to Firefox. It’s enticing the public to argue over and shape how AI will be incorporated into Firefox.
All that has happened just in the last six months of 2025. Who has any clue which one will take the prize, or if the AI browser space will be dominated by any one browser to the extent that Chrome has dominated browsers in the 21st century?
Maybe the ultimate winner hasn’t even been released yet, or invented. All that’s for certain is we’re going to hear much more about AI browsers in 2026—much, much more.
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