The early days of the internet saw intense competition between graphical web browsers: Netscape Navigator faced off against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. No sooner had Explorer won that conflict than a new war for marketshare erupted between Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Google Chrome. This time Chrome emerged as the dominant player, with a marketshare that has been above 60% for most of the past decade, while the next closest rival, Apple’s Safari, has been stuck in the mid-teens. But now, AI is shaking up the browser market, with companies beginning to incorporate new generative and agentic AI capabilities directly into the web navigation tool. That in turn is sparking a fierce new war for users, with Google Chrome, now enhanced with Google’s AI model Gemini, fighting upstarts like Perplexity, with its Comet AI browser, and battered veterans of past browser fights, like Opera, trying to get their mojo back with AI enhancements too.

Full report : AI sparks a fierce new war for users in the browser market, as agentic AI browsers like Perplexity’s Comet and Opera’s Neon compete with Gemini-enhanced Chrome.