2025.21: The Upheaval Coming for the Internet Economy
The best Stratechery content from the week of May 19, 2025, including AI and the future of the web, slam dunks and moonshots at Google, and OpenAI entering the hardware business.
How might a browser be developed?
There’s a confluence of things that have happened recently that have made me question how browsers might be developed: On January 8th 2026, Simon Willison predicted that someone will build a browser using mainly AI-assisted tools within 3 years On January 27th 2026, one human and one agent built a browser from scratch (great experiments) On the 19th February 2026, news came out that Taalas had a chip that can spit out nearly 17,000 tokens per second by baking a model onto the chip. I would like to indulge in a little bit of projection and in my case, some science fiction of my own.
The AI browser wars are about to begin
Artificial intelligence is already writing an obituary for the internet as we know it. So why is everyone building new web browsers?
State of AI 2026 | The Industry-Defining Report
Explore how AI is shaping the digital economy in 2026, with 80+ pages of data on ad spend, app downloads, web behavior, user demographics, and so much more.
AI controls are coming to Firefox | The Mozilla Blog
AI is changing the web, and people want very different things from it. We’ve heard from many who want nothing to do with AI. We’ve also heard from
FOSDEM 2025 - Mozilla Builders: Working with the OSS community to build the future of AI
With AI already transforming how we use computers and the Web, Mozilla believes it's crucial that open source lead the charge. We cannot afford another Internet Explorer situation, where one or a handful of powerful corporations seize control of fundamental technology. Open source AI can and must offer a viable, competitive alternative to closed source commercial offerings.
Atlassian Buys The Browser Company, Browser Wars, Why Atlassian
Atlassian bought The Browser Company, seeking to deliver an AI-enabled browser for work. It’s a reasonable bet, but I’m skeptical that browsers are the future.
2026 State of AI
Sensor Tower’s State of Web 2026 analyzes web traffic, AI referrals, mobile vs. desktop usage, search, social, and discovery trends.
Bez: Generating a browser engine from specs and tests | Hacker News
Edit: replies are making good points about AI capabilities and where the effort really goes. Let’s just say that I meant this in an aspirational sense, rather than where the rubber actually meets the road today.
State of JavaScript 2022
The 2022 edition of the annual survey about the latest trends in the JavaScript ecosystem.
Agentultra - Why I Won't Use AI
If you are a programmer in 2025 you have likely been pressured into adopting generative artificial intelligence tools into your workflow. Maybe you have already been ordered to. You have probably wondered if next year will be the year that you will be replaced with an AI. Or maybe in the next five years. Weren’t we supposed to be replaced already?
Meet Opera’s AI Browser Operator
We're introducing an AI agent into the browser making us the first major browser with AI-based agentic browsing.
Letter to Arc members 2025
On Arc, its future, and the arrival of AI browsers — a moment to answer the largest questions you've asked us this past year.
