Paradigm. I hate the word paradigm.
And yet OpenAI’s Atlas feels like a new paradigm in browsing the internet.
Paradigm is an abused word. When something changes a little, it gets used a lot.
But Atlas is the biggest change in how I browse the internet since I escaped AOL’s walled garden onto the World Wide Web.
The old way we browse is search first. Atlas is AI first. In simple terms, the search bar becomes the AI chat bar.
I’m finding information faster. Instead of the first page of Google, an enshittified mess of ads and SEO, you get a summary of what you need to know.
When you go deeper? Search used to end once you clicked into a site. With Atlas, you keep chatting. ChatGPT sits in the sidebar, ready for follow-up questions.
There are even glimmers of autonomous browsing through Agent Mode. Though for now it feels like watching your parents use the internet complete with ponderous thought process, slow cursor movements, and occasional surrender.
My only criticism is the app icon... It’s dark and loses the “explore the web” design of other browsers. So when Chrome was still open I found myself teleported back by keyboard muscle memory.
Curious if others feel the same shift?
I’ve been using Comet for a few months and I’ve found it quite hard to get out of the default of just using it like chrome.
Definitely finding little pockets of usefulness though. Yesterday I needed to download a bunch of pdf receipts spread across different pages and it was able to do it autonomously