The Rise of AI Browsers: The Third Browser War

In the history of the internet, the browser wars have always been a concentrated reflection of platform control and technological paradigm shifts. From Netscape to IE, and then to Firefox and Chrome, each transformation has profoundly affected users' web experiences. Today, with the rise of large language models (LLM), the third browser war is quietly unfolding.

The Driving Force of a New Round of Change

The traditional search engine model is facing challenges. More and more users are completing tasks on the search results page with "zero clicks," leading to a decrease in traditional web clicking behavior. Meanwhile, rumors that Apple may replace the default search engine in Safari further threaten Google's profit base.

Browsers themselves are also facing a role reshaping. They are not only tools for displaying web pages, but also a collection container of various capabilities such as data input, user behavior, privacy identity, and more. Although AI agents are powerful, to achieve complex page interactions, access local identity data, and control web elements, they still need to rely on the trust boundaries and functional sandboxes of browsers.

Core Value Proposition of AI Browser

The future browser needs to be designed for AI Agents, capable of not only reading but also writing and executing. What truly has the potential to break the current browser market pattern is a new interactive structure: not the display of information, but the invocation of tasks.

Some innovative projects have begun to explore this direction:

• Browser Use: Semanticize the page structure, transforming the visual interface into structured text that can be called by LLM, achieving the mapping from page to instructions.
• Perplexity: Build a native browser Comet, using AI to replace traditional search results.
• Brave: Combines privacy protection with local inference, enhancing search and blocking capabilities with LLM.
• Donut: A new entry point for interacting with AI and on-chain assets.

The common feature of these projects is: attempting to reconstruct the input end of the browser, rather than beautifying its output layer.

Insights for Entrepreneurs

1. Standardization of interface structure: Make the product a "callable" API component.

2. Identity and Access: Become a trusted intermediary layer for AI Agents, helping them overcome trust barriers.

3. Understanding the Traffic Mechanism Again: Shifting from SEO to AEO(Agent Engine Optimization) or ATF(Agentic Task Fulfilment).

In the future browser wars, it will no longer be about grabbing the users' attention, but about winning the trust of AI Agents and gaining access to their calls. Entrepreneurs need to rethink product design and build bridges for the "instruction flow" of the intelligent era.