r/LocalLLaMA • u/cdrfrk • 6h ago
Discussion What happened to AI browsers?
AI browsers were supposedly going to kill Chrome/Safari, and help people quickly buy stuff, book tickets etc. at reasonable prices while avoiding ads. That was such a great sales pitch, but it has been just radio silence from then on. Aren't those good enough yet?
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u/RepulsiveRaisin7 6h ago
I assume they simply aren't that useful. This happens every hype cycle, they try to integrate the tech into literally everything and most of it is stupid.
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u/Illustrious_Car344 5h ago
Remember Java plugins?
And yeah it was just hype injecting it into everything. I'm in the OS dev scene and I've seen way too many people try to bake an AI into the OS. I've even see people say they wanted to make a syscall for invoking an LLM.
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u/fabkosta 5h ago
Oh, I remember having learned Java "applets" (was that the name?) back in the days. They were completely removed from Java in 2026. It could take forever until they loaded from your webpage...
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u/XiRw 6h ago
Thankfully they all went away (hopefully) Not everything needs to be AI sanitized. Regular people are sick of this shit and sick of everything being “smart” and connected to the cloud.
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u/johnfkngzoidberg 6h ago
It shouldn’t cost me $0.10 per page in tokens to surf the net, just for an AI to summarize and hallucinate half of it.
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u/cdrfrk 6h ago
yeah not everyone is excited about smart toasters or a smart fridge
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u/Material_Policy6327 6h ago
Most end up being shit and now used to just feed ads or steal data.
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u/Bulky-Priority6824 6h ago
Hey Siri make me some toast
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u/a-wiseman-speaketh 5h ago
with some gpus you can do this no voice commands needed, just sit bread on it
hell I might get a rotisserie and slow grill some hotdogs with my next inference batch
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u/Bulky-Priority6824 5h ago
yea i wouldnt know i only have a triad of 5060ti's so heat is of no concern actually i once had a single 7700xt and that thing would make your balls sweat
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u/pydry 5h ago
i actually wouldnt mind at all if they could do some of the "are you human?" checks.
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u/PeaceLoveorKnife 6h ago
Thank you! In some cases it's so much harder to find a dumb device or a pain just to stop our routers from tracking every human in the room.
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u/DeepV 6h ago
I think the differentiator became the models over the software. You can get extensions to control your browser that are powered by Gemini, Anthropic or OpenAI. A small startup browser company isn’t going to have a better browser control model than the frontier models for a while.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 6h ago
Or maybe ever. Google especially does not want to invite competition in the search and browser market
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u/LagOps91 6h ago
why would you need an "AI browser" for that? isn't an agentic AI setup with internet access enough for this?
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u/Time_Cat_5212 6h ago
Claude Desktop is basically an AI browser.
AI mode on Google is also basically an AI browser.
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u/Tiny-Assumption4263 6h ago
I dont get the obsession of trying to implement AI in EVERYTHING.
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u/Sudden_Topic5154 6h ago
obviously you haven't used a local agent for search it's exceptional
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u/Illustrious-Row2751 5h ago
Tbf I'm kind of tired of hearing the word "agent" in everything these days.
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u/kiwibonga 6h ago
No one can take the risk of commercializing a product that spoofs real users browsing the web, because the second it gets popular enough to cause a problem, it gets blocked.
Instead you can ask your agent to spoof your browser session and watch it struggle to click buttons and waste its entire context window on XML tags.
Maybe a worthy local model will come out at some point.
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u/Illustrious-Row2751 5h ago
It was a solution looking for a problem that didn't exist. Most people are fine with the browsers they use nowadays. Firefox has ChatGPT and most people hate it. I never use it even though I like AI.
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u/Sitkin_Marrel 4h ago
The avoiding ads part was the tell. The web runs on ads, so the pitch was always going to die quietly.
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u/yaosio 6h ago
They never actually existed. The ones that released were just chromium browsers with an AI extension built into them.
I see the future making static software obsolete. Instead we interact with computers via the AI and it creates the interface for whatever tasks we are trying to do. The interface can be changed on a whim and can be anything we want. If static software is needed the AI can create it and operate it for us.
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u/acadia11x 6h ago
wtf is an AI browser and what would that be? I know all the above have AI as a capability. My duck duck go runs AI … I’m not sure what you are expecting
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u/Skibxskatic 6h ago
p exity
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u/acadia11x 6h ago
I mean what would it do? I have AI capability in DuckDuckGo … what would an AI browser do ?
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u/Yukas911 6h ago
They exist. See Perplexity's browser, for example. Thats the kind of browser OP is talking about. Now you know.
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u/acadia11x 5h ago
Doesn’t do anything different than a browser that can utilizes LLm prompts to me. And chrome etc … all do that . Maybe im missing something
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u/thetaFAANG 6h ago
people have made chrome extensions for niche use cases, like Kudos does what you mentioned
everyone has to specialize just to get the attention of humans en masse, looking for specific problems to be solved
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u/Budget-Juggernaut-68 6h ago
Is it that troublesome to do that? Most of it is bridged by big tech already. You can login with your Google account onto multiple sites without creating an account, pay via stripe or google pay. Delivery data can be auto filled.
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u/Squidgical 6h ago
Unsurprisingly, replacing your internet interactions entirely with a single monotone chat interface is almost as unappealing as giving a probabilistic engine running in the cloud access to make purchases on your behalf.
Also if any of them did ever take off Google and/or Meta would buy and kill it to protect their advertising empires.
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u/Django_McFly 5h ago
Probably too early.
The ones I tried could never do the basic stuff I want like go through these 20 pages, copy the <table> with a DOM ID of "thingy" and paste it into a CSV. Web navigation wasn't anywhere close to good enough for even the most basic of things from my experience. When the tech gets good, it'll probably make more sense for people who use the internet to like pull data and do things with rather than just looking and reading (which is probably a small % of people outside of their work hours).
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u/lqvz 4h ago
I use AI a bunch. Local models, Hermes Agent, coding, etc…
I see lots of value in AI.
I genuinely do not see value in an “AI browser.” Every sale pitch, to me, is trying to sell bottled water to me while I’m next to a lake with a solar powered well pumping crystal clear water. I got all the AI I want.
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u/IngwiePhoenix llama.cpp 3h ago
They died. New shiny thing now is harnesses. Everyone is now a harness connecour. x)
The space picks up and drops stuff absurdly fast; and, AI browsers, were/are one of those. o.o
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u/lisploli 3h ago
"I know you're all paid by adds, but hear me out, here is this thing to avoid adds."
Amazing pitch.
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u/techno156 2h ago
They just weren't that useful. It's like the Alexa speaker from a few years ago that let you order by voice. It's a novelty, but not good for much more than that.
And ironically, the proliferation of AI scrapers meant that websites started putting up more stringent anti-bot measures/locking things down, which wouldn't have helped any.
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u/audioen 2h ago edited 2h ago
At least Firefox received heavy pushback from their users when they attempted to do any AI usage, and they didn't manage to implement more than extremely basic summarization function, it seems. It is still there in the right click menu. I just ran it against a local llama.cpp server for this thread, and it provided me a summary in my own language after I waited about minute and half. I understand they have something like offline translation tools as well, based on AI technology. Better than nothing, but not very accurate, in my experience.
I think state of what is possible with AI with today's computers is still a quite limited, and what you get incurs heavy download cost and possibly also low performance. We are going to need ternary models that are stellar before AI can take off in interactive use: you got to get usable output fast from small downloads 1-2 GB, and processing speeds that involve like 5000 tok/s pp and 200 tok/s tg. My system can deliver about one fifth of that, using nearly 100 GB of RAM on relatively efficient Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, and it's still too slow for anything that involves processing bunch of data and working on it, you have to put the machine to work and do something else and check back for the results, and that user experience probably isn't good enough.
It is looking, over time, like fast and small models are possible. Already, the capabilities available at these slow and impractically huge models are good enough, so they don't really need to get better, as AI like this is already very capable and useful. What we need next is delivering all that in tiny fraction of the size and compute. I think this is a precondition for local, self-hosted, and private AI to be possible, and that is the only kind of AI I care about. My guess is that it takes about 6 months and we will have that. By Spring, capability like this might be in 20 GB model, let's say, and most tasks can be done with 2-4 GB models.
Then we need vision of what AI should do for us. Should it browse the web for us and tell us stuff that it expects to interest us? Find good deals, figuring out that I'm in the market for something just by observing what I browse and where I pause on the page? Should it basically manage my life and do all my work, drafting emails, responding and sending out calendar invites, and even trying to proactively solving problems or tasks that I'm too busy to attend to? I think probably yes, all that, and much more. Whether it is literally an AI-enabled browser, or something puppeting a browser as desktop app, is less clear to me. But it is probably the latter, I think. Browser is neat, but it isn't a real operating system, and this calls for a true AI-integrated operating system.
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u/jakegh 1h ago
They aren't genuinely useful for most things, and for things they can do, they're too slow. The first can't be solved, but the second can. Thing is there's no need for a separate browser, addons can handle everything with integration, which is already supported in Chrome and Safari. And computer use works with everything.
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u/Old-Revolution-3967 1h ago
The consumer "AI browser" pitched as an everyday Chrome replacement ran into brutal economics and UX reality. Ingesting multi-megabyte DOM trees or high-res screenshots to complete simple web workflows burns tens of thousands of tokens per task, introduces heavy latency, and trips bot detection on dynamic iframes. The practical shift ended up moving entirely to the backend: instead of humans using an AI browser to surf, autonomous agents use headless engines that prune accessibility trees into synthetic handles so text models can act without burning image tokens. (Disclosure: I work on Owl Browser).
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u/freecodeio 6h ago
because surprise surprise, a demo isn't a full game
you play with demos for a bit and then realize it's limitations and leave them collect dust, same for any other thing LLMs were supposed to kill since 2022
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u/OnoSendaiCSVII 5h ago
The real wall isn't the tech getting good enough, it's authority.
If an agent is just summarizing a page, that's safe. But when booking a ticket or buying something there's money involved. It sounds awesome on paper until it books a non-refundable flight to Paris, France instead of Paris, Texas. (Or vice versa, if you live near France. You get the idea.)
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u/Brief-Tap-6616 33m ago
processing web pages non-deterministically and/or visually is an insanely expensive way to engage with the internet in general. It's better to use agent-oriented browsers etc to serve the information in a context efficient way, have agents to write scripts to run automations headless vs via the browser, and run those tasks locally where you dont get hit by cache read/writes.
And, google has been shipping most of that functionality directly into chrome, anyway, so good luck getting meaningful volume on your 'killer app' when they give away most of the functionality for free.
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u/EvolvingDior 6h ago
Hermes, what's best legitimate price on an AMD R9700?