This weekend, I was reading a great article by the great Om Malik in which he observed something I hadn’t noticed: When using the Vision Pro, the web browser seems completely out of place on a device designed for immersive experiences.

I defend and love the web, but I can’t refute this inconvenient truth: Safari, Chrome, and their siblings are the only survivors of the age of artificial intelligence, and their gray hairs will become more apparent as time goes on.

For three decades, from Lynx to Chrome, the browser has been driven by one immutable premise: people browsing documents. Artificial intelligence is destroying this paradigm. You don’t see the pages, but you see the pure data, which you reassemble at will. URLs and “back” buttons are relics of another age, and will increasingly become so.

The transformation is already here. Chatbots synthesize direct responses. Immersive devices require interfaces that transcend the “page.” As Josh Miller of The Scanner Company (the company behind Arc and now Dia) says, we need an operating system, not a document viewer. In fact, that’s where the Browser Company is currently located.

It wasn’t voice commands or screenless interfaces that revolutionized the web. It is artificial intelligence that is changing the way we interact with data, breaking down information into remixable streams.

This transformation we are already seeing (hence the hints that OpenAI wants to create its own browser, for example, or aspires to become the next Google), Raises uncomfortable questions about control and power.

Traditional browsers have democratized access with open standards. AI-based gateways not only topple some empires, but also threaten the concentration of control in the hands of new digital oligarchs.

The future needs more than an improved browser. It requires intelligence that understands both the human context and the ocean of data, and it seems very unlikely that anything different will happen. The question is: Can we preserve the openness that made the web great?. And it seems complicated to make this happen.

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Featured image | Denny Müller on Unsplash