> Chromium is an industry wide open source project like linux for good reason

That "good" reason is thanks to Google's monopoly. Chromium is only technically opensource, it's still very much a Google project that's steered by them, ocassionally trying to sneak in anti-features like Web Environment Integrity, Manifest V3 etc.

> We're at an interesting point in browser development

Yes but that's only because of projects like LadyBird and Servo, but unfortunately they're still at a very early stage. The best we can do for web diversity is to boycott all Chromium-based browsers and support smaller projects like Ladybird and Servo (and use Gecko-based browsers in the interim).

Building on top of a bunch of things works well, and is pretty much what Chromium itself is anyways. Building something "new" that is 99% the old thing so you can add your 1% is a different kind of building, and can't be lumped with the former by default. More powerful extensions is definitely the answer, just not one Google wants to allow.

The main problem with this is if browser A adds feature 1 and browser B adds feature 2 then you don't end up with "Chromium + 1 + 2" you end up with "Chromium + 1" or "Chromium + 2". Repeat for a couple dozen Chromium folks and your single extra feature doesn't look all that enticing anymore. The inverse way of looking at it is "if you're only adding 1% on top of Chromium, it's unlikely to amount to anything worth the average user switching for". Especially since Chrome is starting to push Gemeni natively anyways.

For these reasons, I think Chromium paint jobs are the least interesting thing to happen to browser development in a very very long time. Servo for embedded, Ladybird for "something different", and so on are much more interesting. These kinds of things, as you say, are more to the scale of what an individual browser extension used to be.

The bothering part is the browser factor form. Why not just an extension?

>Chromium is an industry wide[...]

But is it though? Feels to me like Google just does whatever it wants. Nobody except Google wants manifest v3. Nobody wants "Web Environment Integrity", etc.

> Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine?

It should be fast when rendering HTML/CSS. I don't really care about JavaScript performance, because where possible I switch it off anyways.

It should be customizable and configurable, more than Firefox was before Electrolysis and certainly much more than Chrome.

It should support addons that can change, override, mangle, basically do everything imaginable to site content. But with configurable permissions per site.

It should support saving the current state of a website including the exact rendering at that moment for archiving. It should also support annotations (like comments, emphasis, corrections) for that. And it should support diffs for those saved states.

And if you include "the browser" in that:

I want a properly usable bookmarks manager, not the crap that current browsers have. Every bookmark should include (optionally, but easily) the exact page state at the time of bookmarking. Same for history.

Sync everything to a configurable git repo: config, bookmarks, history, open windows/tabs, annotations and saved website snapshots.

I want easily usable mass operations, like "save me every PDF from this tab group", "save all the pictures and name them sometopic-somewebsite-date-id.jpg" or "print all tabs that started with this search and all sites visited from there as PDF printouts into the documentation folder".

I want the ability to watch a website for changes, so the browser visits in the background and notifies me if anything relevant is different (this could be a really hard thing to get right I guess...).

I want "network perspectives" (for lack of a better word): show me this website as it would look from my local address, over this VPN, with my language set to Portuguese, ..., easily switchable per tab.

I want completely configurable keybindings for everything, like vimperator, but also for the bookmark manager, settings, really everything.

And I want a pony ;)

I think Google has proven with their recent actions concerning android that they really can't be trusted with big, critical open source projects.

I think the concerns are not about feature requests but about leveraging embrace-extend-extinguish dynamics to push the web as a whole closer to being locked into dependence on Google as a platform. There are mountains of articles on the topic, ranging from ad blockers to privacy to DRM. But the critiques are old news to anyone who's been following the topic for a while.

I'd like to see browsers support the Gemini protocol and the Gemtext format.

> The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform.

I'd prefer something that's not crazy complex, that's not "an entire app platform" designed and implemented by Google. Google essentially controls the W3C (Mozilla would vanish if Google stopped funding it), and controls the monopoly rendering engine.

Half of websites are better without JavaScript and web fonts, and 99% are just text, images, and videos with maybe a few simple controls. For the other 1% I can fire up Google Chrome and suffer the whole platform.

I want a web rendering engine for the 1%, that does the simple stuff quickly and isn't a giant attack surface around 30 years of technical debt and unwanted features calling itself an "application platform."

Full support for Ublock Origin. Perhaps at the native level rather than as an extension.

I would like scratch made browser to focus on performance.

Chromium browsers eat my RAM and drain my computer battery.

until your company rolls it out

Another possible aspect of it is that probably more and more sites are blocking AI crawlers through e.g. Cloudflare's support for blocking AI crawler and AI agents. This will give them a backdoor to that content through a user's connection.

I am not sure if this is happening, but as blocking becomes more prevalent, having a widely-used browser will help.

If such a browser was unavoidable I'd just drop off the web and read books. They can only turn the screws so much.

Man, I miss the old days, seeing new tech come out and not immediately wondering how the worst parts of our industry are going to turn it into the torment nexus.

I think the point is: why is OpenAI wasting its time on this? If it's just another channel for billing tokens then OK I guess, but it's not like it's a huge breakthrough.

OpenAI should be the roads, not the trucks. Let other product teams sort out the AI browsers. OpenAI has lots of problems to solve related to models and thats where they should focus. This is a side quest.

That's exactly what i think it is. Have a legion of users willingly scraping the internet for you, going behind captchas, logins, and all the mechanisms that was put there to stop bots. With this every user user of the browser is also a bot. Now i wonder if the agent string will be something unique, and certain places will just block those browsers from their websites by it.

>any browser on iOS uses the safari engine under the hood?

Literally every browser on iOS. Up until iOS 17.4 you were not even allowed to have alternative browser engine. And that still holds true outside EU.

https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...

I use Orion as my daily driver, mostly because of its Kagi integration.

Firefox still exists.

There's Orion. It's not bad, but I don't love it either.

Zen is a really nice Firefox fork.

Ladybird is coming along.

First, Chromium is also based on WebKit so that means really only one browser engine.

Second, I imagine so many web sites and web applications have, knowingly or unknowingly, made themselves dependent on WebKit or Chromium specific behavior, it's almost impossible to write a new browser compatible with all (or even most) of the web.

I'd go a step further: has OpenAI actually achieved any significant research breakthroughs on par with Google's transformers? So why does everybody think they will achieve the next N breakthroughs necessary to get to AGI?

They're spinning up their own advertising platform; chatgpt is a coherent contender to google's search bar, over a long enough time span if they can maintain user engagement numbers, it seems plausible that they could secure half of google's ad revenue. Spinning up a browser is not cheap but it certainly lines up with their actions of spinning up a perpetual advertising machine via chatgpt to fund other things. Which might include AGI if/when that happens.

>a company that internally believes it's actually close to unlocking super-intelligence

I am not sure if this is still true, they started backing off from this line of reasoning summer of 2024 and haven't returned to it.

I think they need to respond to all the funds they've raised and need to generate money somehow beyond subscriptions.

No, but their actions do suggest they think they're nearing a disruption to both browser and web page: a new way to acquire and make use of information.

Like an information OS for the information cloud.

OpenAI has always had the stance of “commercialize narrow AI that is research aligned with AGI development”. In fact they used to ask this as an interview question — “should we commercialize narrow AI or aim to put all resources into AGI”. The correct answer required you to prove you drank the kool aid and also wanted to make tons of money.

They are multiple companies in-one. One that is pushing for AGI, model development, one that is trying to build consumer apps and "win" AI applications/platform moat.

It seems like for better or worse if you want to be a web company, there's a lot of incentive to try and become a platform. A limitation for the likes of Zoom, Dropbox, Proton, and seemingly OpenAI is they have to struggle to integrate with calendars, office suites, and even the browser itself. And it may be turning out to be true that it's more feasible to simply invent your own parallel ecosystem of benefits and office suites and online storage drives than to attempt to negotiate with the gatekeepers of existing ones.

I would like to think that the "real" solution is strong web protocols and interoperability, And perhaps even something like an explicit anti-platform ethos. As it stands it seems like the strategy of being a platform is to outrace protocols in terms of offering new capabilities. But it would at least be nice if protocols are close enough behind that they're effectively a "safety net", or the equivalent of generic drugs, that everyone can fall back to.

Is this true? Most of mine is in a text editor. In a previous role, it was in Excel. My partner spends her day in Power BI, etc etc. Are we outliers? What jobs are mostly in browsers instead of task-oriented specific other software tools?

Modern mainstream web is unusable without an ad-blocker. If it can't have uBlock, adguard, etc in it then it's basically useless

Love Vivaldi! It has improved significantly over the years! I use it in tandem with Firefox.

I love to have thumbnail tabs!

"Chromia" has a nice ring to it. "OpenAI just increased the number of Chromia by one."

Worse: The main way it could whelm involves exploiting the user for evil.

Chromium is highly dependent on Google’s interests. We see how they chose to implement Manifest V3 in a way that, through a strange coincidence(/s), neuters the capabilities of Ad Blocking extensions.

All downstream browsers are affected by Google’s bottom line. Putting lipstick and a few nice features on top of an engine that you don’t control doesn’t make your browser a true alternative from Google’s.

AI is newsworthy.

Good grief. Developers who use Unity/Unreal/Game Maker/ whatever don’t announce their game as being a revolutionary new tech.

The problem isn’t that they made yet another chromium based browser with their garbage on top. The problem is that they’re positioning it as this exciting and radical new thing when it’s just chromium with their garbage on top.

Surely they should just be able to prompt their code assistant to write a complete browser and come back in a couple days to find it running, right?

They could simply vibe-code a new browser engine from scratch using gpt - I believe that's the whole purpose of the AI stories?

I'm curious why these things are not distributed as extensions rather than full browsers.

Because people are tired of seeing LLMs, which aren't even good at the things they are claimed to be good at, shoehorned into everything whether or not it provides a shred of value to the user.

> Why the negativity?

Because:

> A browser is the gateway between end user and technology/information/AI themselves. Of course everyone with money is racing trying to control it.

?

What's the benefit for the consumer?