Under the hood it’s the same Blink engine that power’s the regular Opera browser (and Chrome) but I really like the interface on this experiment. It’s described as being a “concept browser”, much like a “concept car”, which is a nice way of framing experiments like this. More concept browsers please!
I love the web, and this thing is bad for the web.
- Atlas substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it’s showing you the web
- The user experience makes you guess what commands to type instead of clicking on links
- You’re the agent for the browser, it’s not being an agent for you
It’s very clear that a lot of the new AI era is about dismantling the web’s original design.
A wonderful bit of spelunking into the annals of software interfaces by Elise Blanchard.
I guess, because browser-makers tend to be engineers so they do engineering-type things like making the browser an app-delivery platform able to run compiled code. Or fight meaningless user experience battles like hiding the URL, or hiding View Source – both acts that don’t really help early users that much, but definitely impede the user path from being a consumer to being a fully-fledged participant/maker.
Make Twitter Great Again:
Fix Twitter is a browser extension to always show “replying to” in replies and threads along with an option to restore the old-school @-mentions.
Andreas demoed these ideas yesterday. Proper ambient badging and a way of getting at URLs even if a progressive web app is running in fullscreen or standalone mode. Great stuff!
As mobile and desktop operating systems converge, Apple’s hypocritical browser policy becomes clearer and clearer.
Nine people. Five days. Thirty years.