AI is already changing web browsers. Here’s what’s new.
Odds are good that your first encounter with AI—whether it was ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, or GitHub Co-Pilot—happened in a web browser. And, as the technology continues to evolve, web browsers are aggressively adding new features that fundamentally change how they're used.
Browsers are exiting the era of web search and transitioning to a new era of AI. Exactly what this means for web surfers remains to be seen, but a few clear trends have emerged.
AI is the future of search in your browser
Search was a notorious problem for the original ChatGPT, so much so that some guessed AI would never threaten search engines. However, that has recently changed as AI continues to grow and improve. The latest AI large language models (LLMs) can quickly and easily ingest new information. Now, AI can search the web and integrate articles published just hours, or even minutes, old into responses.
The most apparent example of search-based AI is Microsoft’s Copilot. There’s several ways to access it: Edge, the default Microsoft browser on Windows PCs, tucks Copilot into the right sidebar, recent versions of Windows 11 include it on the taskbar, and the latest Windows laptops now include a dedicated Copilot hotkey. All of these summon a familiar chatbot interface which, if asked, can search the web through Bing exclusively.

Photo: Matthew Smith/Microsoft
And it works well.l. A question asking about news on the FAA’s efforts to hire air traffic controllers sent me to a recent article from CNN, while a question about the best video card for Homeworld 3 produced an accurate recounting of the published system requirements. It’s not infallible but, then again, the same can be said of old-fashioned web search. Copilot is ad-free, too (for now).
Edge isn’t alone, though it has a clear lead in the desktop market. Opera’s AI assistant, Aria, can search the web, but it’s slower and less detailed. Arc, a newer web browser, offers AI search in its mobile app (in fact, it’s kind of the mobile app’s whole thing), but a similar feature for the desktop, Arc Explore, is not yet released. Firefox is the odd browser out, for now, though that’s likely to change in the next few months.
Of course, many of these features will also come to Google Search, as well as AI-first search engines like Perplexity. While I expect many people will still choose to access search engines as a website, as we’ve all been doing just that for about two decades. But web browsers are no longer a requirement and, as AI improves, browser search bars and sidebar search assistants will shift even more people away from Google’s front page, which has itself become a home for AI-generated search result summaries.
Summarization and page search
AI search isn’t just useful for navigating the web. It’s also handy for summarizing and searching a page—and I suspect that, for some users, this might prove to be AI’s killer feature.
Edge, Chrome, Arc, and Opera all support this feature to varying degrees, and while the means of activating it differ, the results are similar. AI summarization will condense an article or a web page to a few key points, usually no longer than 100 or 200 words.
And it can go further than that. Most AI summarization features let you ask for specific details, or to have the information formatted in a specific way. You can ask for a bulleted summary with bullet points or ask to have the article reformatted as an email to send to a family member or coworker.
AI summarization is handy in many situations, but it’s a potential game-changer for people who shift through a lot of documents every day. But don’t forget it’s not just about webpages; you can use a web browser to open, and then summarize, other types of files, including .TXT, .PDF, and .EPUB files.

Edge’s Copilot is a standout here, because it can parse any file opened in the browser. It’s arguably the best free tool for searching through or summarizing digital magazines and books on a PC, and results can include citations with links that will take you to the specific page and paragraph where the cited information was found.
AI page search is currently available in Edge, Opera, and Arc’s mobile app. Expect the list to grow quickly, though, as competitors add their own versions of these features.
Don’t want to write that email? Let AI do it for you
Edge’s Copilot has two tabs: Chat and Compose. Chat is where you’ll want to go for AI search and summarization. But what if you want to write an email or social media post? That’s where the Compose tab comes in. If you’re using the Opera web browser, Aria also has this feature, which is activated by tapping the pencil icon to the left of the chat’s input field.

Everyone—even free users who haven’t logged in to a Microsoft account—can access Copilot Compose, though in my experience it’s much quicker for users who log in. Opera, on the other hand, does require a login to access Aria.
The Compose tab is rather similar between the two browsers. You’ll find templates, including email and blog post, as well as several options to customize the response tone and length. I recommend trying the “short” response length first. It’s usually the best option for email and, if you use the blog post template, it’s not bad for popping off a quick social media post, especially if you just need some short descriptive text to accompany a photo or video.
It’s likely this feature will become the standard for most email services over the next few years, and that could make browser-based AI assistants like Copilot and Aria less useful. Google recently announced it will use Gemini to generate emails in Gmail and it's accessible through the app or the Chrome browser (as an early Workspace Labs feature). There's also a button for Gemini in the Gmail; web interface now, that can organize your mail, for example, showing just unread messages or tracking down order details for a purchase.
Local LLMs
Most of the AI features accessed in web browsers today are hosted in the cloud. For example, Copilot isn’t running on your computer but instead in a Microsoft data center. The same is true for just about every other AI based in a web browser..
That’s usually not a problem. It’s a web browser, after all—an Internet connection is assumed. However, you might have trouble using a browser’s AI features on spotty or low-bandwidth connections, and privacy-minded users might be leery of sending every question and query through big tech’s servers.
The Opera browser offers a solution that’s currently unique: you can download and run an LLM locally in the web browser. The browser offers a broad range of models, too, from Google’s Gemma to Microsoft’s Phi and Meta’s Llama. The LLAMA3:8B-TEXT-Q4_K_M model is a good place to start if you’re not sure what to pick.

Photo: Matthew Smith/Aria
While a handful of tools exist to accomplish the same thing (and Opera’s implementation is based on Ollama, an open-source tool), the simplicity of accessing an LLM in Opera makes the feature extremely accessible, even for AI novices. All you need to do is install Opera Developer, click a few options, and wait for the LLM to download.
Once it’s installed, you can open Aria and select the drop-down menu at the top of the chat window to select and chat with any model you’ve downloaded. Just be warned: you’ll need a beefy PC to handle even the smallest model, and the largest models will require gobs of memory (at least 32GB, and possibly 64GB or more).
What’s next?
The AI features I’ve listed here are ready to use right now, and they’re already changing how people use a web browser. AI search and summarization, both across the web and within web pages and documents currently open in the browser, will slowly but surely revolutionize browsers.
What does that mean? I expect we’ll see web browsers and search engines replace ranked lists of results with generated responses, both across the web and within specific web pages and local documents. These summaries will include links to the source of the information, which will usually be a web page, but might also be a document on a local hard drive, a private network, or cloud storage.
But, of course, there’s still many questions left to answer. Will the chatbot become the new standard web browser UI, or will we stick with search bars? Will we continue to rely on the cloud, or begin to use locally hosted AI models? What will these changes mean for websites that rely on visitor traffic to make a buck? Only time will tell, but one thing is for sure. Web browsers will never be the same.