- Washington Post [no paywall] – I tested four new versions. The promise is real, but major issues still need to be addressed – The browser wars are back — and this time they’re supercharged by artificial intelligence. In the second half of 2025, a crop of new AI-powered web browsers bloomed across the tech landscape, offering the first major reimagining of the bread-and-butter software tool in decades. It also hinted at the answer to a still-open question: Will this be the way that AI becomes entrenched in everyday life? And is the technology ready for that? To explore those questions, I spent weeks testing four AI-powered browsers — ChatGPT’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, the Browser Company’s Dia and Brave with Leo AI — on some of the things I normally do online: casual searching, reading the news, researching for my work and shopping. And I’m here to report that the convenience is real. The browsers, which are rapidly improving, helped me get things done with fewer tabs, faster answers and less information overload. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.) But serious problems still lurk within that convenience. Let’s walk through my to-do list.
- The Verge – no paywall – Yahoo Scout looks like a more web-friendly take on AI search / It’s somewhere between 10 blue links and a full-blown AI assistant, and so far, it feels like the right mix. Yahoo’s big AI play is, in many ways, actually a return to the company’s roots. Three decades ago, Yahoo was known as “Jerry’s guide to the world wide web,” and was designed as a sort of all-encompassing portal to help people find good stuff on an increasingly large, hard-to-parse internet. In the early aughts, the rise of web search more or less obviated that whole idea. But now, Yahoo thinks, we’ve come back around. With a new product called Scout has two jobs, really. The first is just to be a guide, to find stuff on the web. “It’s moved from ‘how do I find things on the internet’ to weeding through clickbait and now AI slop,” says Eric Feng, who runs Yahoo’s research group and has been leading the Scout project. But Scout’s job is also to bring AI summaries and smarts to all of Yahoo’s other products, and to help Yahoo users pull all that disparate data into one place. In a funny twist, Yahoo may be perfectly positioned to do this well. Because Yahoo runs huge content verticals like Sports and Finance, with a big newsroom of its own and partnerships with many other publishers, it has a huge amount of high-quality reference material for Scout. It also has Yahoo Weather and Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Horoscopes and Yahoo Shopping and Yahoo So Many Other Things Besides. Yahoo is a full-fledged content machine, and it can just point an LLM at all that content. “We’re the only ones who can take our user data, our usage data, our content, our relationships and information, and combine that with everything we know about search into an AI answer engine,” Lanzone says.”
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