The engineering complexity of browsers

The AI labs fighting for attention during the Super Bowl call to mind another iconic Super Bowl moment: Apple’s 1984 ad for the Macintosh, which promised that the personal computer would be a source of unbound wonder, freedom, and delight.

They were right, but over time, the personal computer has also become cluttered with errands.

These “computer errands”—downloading a W-2 when tax season rolls around, hunting for the right coupon code before checkout, or navigating the unholy labyrinth of the Amazon Web Services dashboard just to change one permission setting—have taken over our digital lives. Atlas, OpenAI’s agentic browser, sprang from the idea that AI should handle this tedium for you.

In this week’s episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with two members of the Atlas team, Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher. Goodger is Atlas’s head of engineering, and Fisher is a member of the technical staff. Both are legends of the browser world. They’ve spent decades building the modern web, working together on Netscape, Firefox, and Chrome before arriving at Atlas. From that vantage point, they told Dan how they think browsing is about to change, why building a browser is harder than it looks, and what it’s like to create a new one with AI coding tools like Codex.

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Timestamps:  

00:01:57 - Introduction
00:11:51 - Designing an AI browser that’s intuitive to use
00:15:24 - How the web changes if agents do most of the browsing
00:25:06 - Why traditional websites will not become obsolete
00:29:00 - A browser that stays out of the way versus one that shows you around
00:39:51 - How the team uses Codex to build Atlas
00:44:47 - The craft of coding with AI tools
00:52:33 - Why Goodger and Fisher care so much about browsers

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Ben Goodger: Ben Goodger (@bengoodger) 
• Darin Fisher: Darin Fisher (@darinwf) 

OpenAI’s browser, Atlas: Introducing ChatGPT Atlas