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Is AI the future of web browsing?

- BRIAN X. CHEN

When was the last time you thought about your web browser?

If you don't remember, no one will blame you. Web browsers have remained fundamentally unchanged for decades: You open an app, such as Chrome, Safari or Firefox, and type a website into the address bar. Many of us settled on one and fell into what I call “browser inertia”, never bothering to see if there’s anything better.

Yet a web browser is important because so much of what we do on computers takes place inside one, including word processing, chatting on Slack and managing calendars and email.

That's why I felt excited when I recently tried Dia, a new kind of web browser from the Browser Co of New York, a startup. The app is powered by generative artificial intelligence, the technology driving popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, to answer our questions. Dia illuminates how a web browser can do much more than load websites - and even help us learn and save time.

I tested Dia for a week and found myself browsing the web in new ways. In seconds, the browser provided a written recap of a 20-minute video without my watching its entirety. While scanning a breaking news article, the browser generated a list of other relevant articles for a deeper understanding. I even wrote to the browser’s builtin chatbot for help proofreading a paragraph of text.