I think a lot of people here are kind of concerned that there's only three browsers now, and overwhelmingly really only two: Google Chrome and Safari for iOS. Internet Explorer is just Chrome now and while I use Firefox it is still pretty tiny in usage stats. I do not consider things like Epiphany/Gnome Web as serious contenders, and even if I did that would still be only one more niche browser. Things without JS support like NetSurf, in my opinion, don't count at all.

It's a little scary when a single megacorp has so much power over something ostensibly open like the internet, but it also has historically taken an incredible amount of resources in order to make a browser making it hard for new players to break in. A modern web browser is arguably more complicated than an operating system...hell, it arguably is an operating system. It touches a ton of aspects of computer science, and requires lots of dedicated workers to keep up with web standards.

Because it has been such an intractable problem for so long, it's an extremely tempting target when the circumstances have changed. Anyone here can basically have a metaphorical intern working as many hours as they want for ~$20-$100/month. A problem that would be impossible for a single person five years ago suddenly seems "almost possible" when you can work at a higher level and have the pesky "code" details taken care of for you.

How does your custom AI-built browser challenge the current browser triopoly?

The LLMs are trained on the code of existing browsers. This is essentially a massive process of turning code you don't understand into code you don't understand.

The code details are pretty much all of the details, other than the protocols and standards.

If you understood the codebase of existing browsers (or at least could be confident in making arbitrary changes to existing browsers, perhaps with AI assistance?) then the triopoly wouldn't be threatening because you could just patch out manifestv3 whenever you want.

There is also the problem of people not testing their websites to be compatible with your custom browser. But I would say this is a problem on the protocol level.

> A problem that would be impossible for a single person five years ago suddenly seems "almost possible" when you can work at a higher level and have the pesky "code" details taken care of for you.

It was already possible - The Ladybird browser started with one person and then a team of experts in maintaining browsers joined in. It makes a lot of sense for them to try to build one from scratch; with / without AI.

The problem which applies to all non mainstream browsers: Is anyone going to use your browser over the established ones because of some technical detail such as, who wrote it or what it is written in?

99.999% of people only care about whether if it just works and disappears away from the user whilst they're using it as a daily driver for browsing or doing work.

How is AI surely going to make this better the other than inexperienced folks throwing PRs they have not read? In fact, it helps the experts rather than the vibe coders.