For two decades, the browser was a static window — you did the work. In 2025, the browser quietly evolved into an AI-enhanced environment, where understanding intent and reducing friction became as crucial as navigation itself.

You open dozens of tabs, chase links, copy information across tools, repeat searches, and manually complete tasks that should take seconds, not minutes. Browsing is slow, fragmented, and mentally taxing. And that's the problem AI browsers are trying to solve.

Instead of acting as a passive viewer of web pages, the modern browser increasingly understands on-screen content, preserves context, and reduces the effort required to complete tasks.

Rather than navigating everything manually, users can rely on the browser to interpret content, surface relevant actions, and streamline common workflows.

This added context is the most significant shift in browsers since the introduction of tabs.

In this issue, we present the most comprehensive snapshot of the AI browser ecosystem today — including the core players with scale, the challengers redefining workflows, and the adjacent layers reshaping how people interact with the web.

Key takeaway: the browser experience is shifting from a “click and read” process to an intelligence layer that understands pages, content, and user intent.

While some companies experiment with workflow automation, the broader shift is toward deeply embedding AI across everyday browsing experiences.

Unlike the challengers we'll explore shortly, these are not experiments. They are browsers with scale, distribution, and long-term AI strategies already shaping how people browse.

With Gemini, Chrome is transforming into an AI-enhanced environment for assisted workflows. Gemini can read the current page, rewrite text, analyze PDFs and documents, and support form-filling and other guided workflows.

For example, you could open an email marketing blog post and say, “Use the tips and best practices outlined in this article to craft a compelling cold outreach email for me.”

Chrome's main advantage is its distribution: AI is layered directly onto existing browsing behavior, giving users seamless access within a familiar experience.

Microsoft is positioning Edge as the browser for work.

Copilot helps users summarize dashboards, analyze SharePoint or OneDrive docs, work with spreadsheets, draft emails or briefs, and trigger actions across the Microsoft 365 suite.

A single query might look like this: “Analyze this sales dashboard, highlight anomalies, and draft a summary email for leadership.”

This is less “AI for browsing” and more “AI embedded in every work task” performed through the browser.

Alice AI by Yandex represents one of the most deeply integrated AI visions in the browser market, embedding intelligence throughout the browsing experience rather than confining it to a single feature.

Alice AI can analyze text, images, videos, PDFs, and links. This empowers users to interact directly with the content, ask questions, extract insights, or rewrite the text in a specific style.

Over time, Alice AI will support more complex, multi-step interactions — such as navigation assistance, form filling, and planning richer scenarios like exploring destinations and building itineraries.

This approach makes intelligence a native part of how the browser understands content and supports decisions.

Aria is Opera's attempt to rethink browser UX from first principles. It can summarize articles, rewrite content, find sources, automatically manipulate tabs, and reorganize the browsing workspace.

For example, users can ask: “Close all shopping tabs, keep only research tabs, group them, and summarize each group.” Opera's bet is that AI should manage information flow and reduce cognitive load — not just respond to prompts in a chat window.

Opera is trying to reinvent the browser UX around the idea that an AI assistant should manage your information flow, not just respond in a chat box.

Emerging browsers in this group experiment with AI-first designs, new workflows, and privacy-focused approaches, offering a glimpse into the category's future.

Brave is building a privacy-first AI stack. Leo runs local and hybrid models, allowing users to summarize, translate, and analyze content without sending data to the cloud. This makes AI browsing feel safer by default. For example: “Summarize this 20-page PDF locally and translate the key paragraphs into Spanish.”

SigmaOS treats work as a pipeline rather than a collection of tabs. Its AI tool, Airis, turns open pages into sources for drafting, summarizing, and structured task creation.

SigmaOS feels like Notion, Chrome, and ChatGPT combined, enabling queries such as: “Turn these eight open tabs into a project plan with tasks, deadlines, and draft content.”

Orion pairs a lightweight browser with Kagi, a paid, privacy-focused search engine. This niche but influential segment is designed for users willing to pay for “no ads, no noise, high-quality answers.”

It enables queries like: “Give me the five most credible sources on this topic and ignore SEO-bait content.”

Vivaldi hasn't gone all-in on AI browsing. Instead, it focuses on tools that enhance personal productivity and customization, appealing to users who value control and personalization over heavy automation.

These products are not full browsers, but they significantly alter how people interact with the web by adding intelligence around existing browsing behavior.

The AI browser race isn't just about adding a chatbot to the sidebar. Beneath the surface, several structural shifts are redefining the essence of browsing.

The browser is no longer just a window to the internet. It is becoming an intelligent layer—aware of what's on the screen, able to understand context, and increasingly capable of assisting with everyday tasks.

Across Chrome, Edge, Yandex, Opera, and a new wave of challengers, the direction is clear: browsing is shifting from “click and read” to “state your intent and let the browser reduce the work.”

In the near future, users may ask, “Help me plan a budget weekend trip,” and the browser will compare options, filter results based on preferences, surface relevant constraints, and organize the results—all without forcing users to juggle dozens of tabs.

The next phase isn't just AI assistants inside browsers. It's browsers that behave less like passive viewers and more like intelligent systems — transforming how we discover, understand, and act on information across the web.

Over to you: which of these shifts is likely to shape browsing the most by the end of 2026?

Thanks for reading.