OpenAI launches Atlas broswer.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-unveils-ai-browser-atlas-2025-10-21/
OpenAI on Tuesday unveiled ChatGPT Atlas, a long-anticipated artificial intelligence-powered web browser built around its popular chatbot, in a direct challenge to Google Chrome's dominance.
The launch marks OpenAI's latest move to capitalize on 800 million weekly active ChatGPT users, as it expands into more aspects of users' online lives by collecting data about consumers' browser behavior. It could accelerate a broader shift toward AI-driven search, as users increasingly turn to conversational tools that synthesize information instead of relying on traditional keyword-based results from Google — intensifying competition between OpenAI and Google.
OpenAI said Atlas launches Tuesday on Apple laptops and will later come to Microsoft's Windows, Apple's iOS phone operating system and Google's Android phone system.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it a "rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be about and how to use one."
But analyst Paddy Harrington of market research group Forrester said it will be a big challenge "competing with a giant who has ridiculous market share."
OpenAI's browser is coming out just a few months after one of its executives testified that the company would be interested in buying Google's industry-leading Chrome browser if a federal judge had required it to be sold to prevent the abuses that resulted in Google's ubiquitous search engine being declared an illegal monopoly.
But U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta last month issued a decision that rejected the Chrome sale sought by the U.S. Justice Department in the monopoly case, partly because he believed advances in the AI industry already are reshaping the competitive landscape.
I have just installed Lynx.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday October 23, @09:31AM (1 child)
I think it might be interesting to normal users, that doesn't know better. If it's pre-installed on the system it would be even better cause then they could hide the installation request of telling the user that it wants to store all browser "memories", as in everything you do with the browser. From their perspective it's probably approaching perfect harvesting. Now you don't have to guess anymore or try to match cookies or sessions or other forms of trying to ID the users. Just have them agree to it upon installation and you are done.
It's a surprise, or it's just been a day or so and not really publicly used yet, that other websites are ok with it. Since with GPT-Surfing or whatever we should call it, it will not want to visit the other sites but just take all their information. So not showing their ads. Will more and more websites require that you sign-in or logon or something to even see the bare basics of their front page? It it takes off I guess it could have some kind of profound impact on the way the web looks and works. Not sure if it will be better or worse, just different.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday October 23, @10:07PM
What difference would it make if I signed on to anything?
It's got a record of anything I did? Usernames? passwords? Content?
I guess the day of the "web store"' is over, as each merchant will either have to piggyback onto Amazon or persuade the customer to install yet another app to access funds. That requires a lot of trust to grant internet to an oddball app just to buy something.
Amazon / eBay must love this! They are poised to become the main escrow agents of the internet, as no one is going to trust these new browsers.
With all this monitoring, no wonder modern systems demand such a fast internet connection. They wanna snoop-and-report so fast the average doofus isn't aware of what's happening.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday October 23, @12:18PM (1 child)
Or chromium again?
(Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Thursday October 23, @12:43PM
Literally Chromium again:
"Atlas is OpenAI’s Mac browser built on Chromium."
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12628461-setting-up-the-atlas-browser#:~:text=Atlas%20is%20OpenAI's%20Mac%20browser,-party%20sign-in%20prompts. [openai.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Thursday October 23, @12:53PM
But no no no for linux.
Probably good it's not.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday October 23, @01:19PM (2 children)
I called it!
Once the internet (and social media) is full of AI slop it, and search engines, will be unusable. So you'll read info/propaganda from an AI interpretation instead of a HTML rendering of trash. Using a browser to render HTML directly would be like trying to prospect for gold down at the sewer treatment plant.
This thing is the future. Like it or not.
The only two problems I see are: its a thin reskin of chrome. So you could just install an extension on chrome to get the same effect, its not a "new browser" LOL.
And secondly its built on chrome which is funded by Google so you can expect Google to try and stop them while adding Gemini features to chrome (which they've already done, but I mean a lot more)
If, today, I ask gemini to give me an image rendering of the basic html "hello world" I kid you not it gave me a verbal description of "The text "Hello, World!" is rendered by the web browser, typically in the top-left corner as standard body content." which is absolutely useless, however you can imagine in a couple years you'd get an image of the basic "hello world" html web page in an imaginative browser or something. LLMs and AI are pretty useless today.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday October 23, @11:21PM (1 child)
For now, it is more likely to have an AI-crash the way the dotcom one was.
Google started with the search and added a browser for tracking - their market share was crushing by that time and the browser was an extension.
I contrast the AI-bros are yet to show a profit so far, rely on shoddy deals to show growth in capitalization [noahpinion.blog] (while still burning billions) and their browser seems more an after-thought crossbred with a hail-marry.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Friday October 24, @07:33PM
For now, it is more likely to have an AI-crash the way the dotcom one was.
And the AI bubble is many times larger than the dot com bubble. I wonder whether that will cause the inevitable economic depression, or the fake money (Bitchcoin etc), or something else. In American history we have had three major depressions. They were all preceded by huge income gaps between the very rich and everyone else.
Today the gap is the biggest in history.
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE
(Score: 5, Touché) by Undefined on Thursday October 23, @02:22PM (4 children)
It's difficult to make me smile in the morning.
But that did it.
[raises coffee cup]
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 2) by jb on Friday October 24, @07:10AM (3 children)
As each year goes by, the thought of ditching the web entirely and returning to gopher space starts to look more and more attractive...
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday October 24, @01:16PM
Though the name has been hijacked by Google, and thus googlebombed out of existence, the Gemini Protocol [geminiprotocol.net] is becoming a useful alternative. It's far better than Gopher and has a much higher signal to noise ratio than the WWW.
See CAPCOM [gemini] or one of the other Gemini aggregators [geminiprotocol.net]. You'll need a client like Lagrange or Amfora first. Again, see the FAQ which I have just linked to.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aafcac on Friday October 24, @03:00PM (1 child)
Between this and the AWS outage a few days ago that left large swathes of the internet inaccessible, it's high time that people start to move away from those sorts of platforms and more towards ones that are less centralized. Even just posting here is preferable to posting on FB or whatever equivalent people are using these days. Sure, there have been a fair number of glitches in recent time, but it's still better.
It drives me nuts how complicated websites are, there's a bunch of stuff that I should be able to automate with the appropriate credentials, but are a massive pain because they put a bunch of nonsense up before you even get to the login fields. I shouldn't need a ton of specialty software to download my bank statements for local processing. It's a bank, put the log in field on the front page and allow the first correct authentication to go through without the anti-robot nonsense. The 2nd and up attempts being subjected to anti-robot nonsense is fair enough, but not the first.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Saturday October 25, @03:19AM
"Between this and the AWS outage a few days ago that left large swathes of the internet inaccessible, it's high time that people start to move away from those sorts of platforms and more towards ones that are less centralized. "
Apparently I already am on them as I never noticed one single problem the whole time that was happening. Then again I do not go to most of them trash sites and never have.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday October 24, @07:25PM
I swear, bro...
When masked police can stop you on the street and demand that you prove citizenship, your nation is a POLICE STATE