why do we still need general purpose browsers anyway. a custom X client, an HN client, an OpenAI client are likely sufficient for most purposes.
mainstream news sites are landfills of terrible banner ad tech. Once we can use AI for efficient scraping into e-paper interfaces, the smart people will migrate to a quieter luxury experience, probably something more modular than a browser.
Not every organization can make decent clients/apps. And those that can will embed unblockable ads and dark patterns into them.
For example Amazon.com is usable with an adblocker but the Amazon app is a horrific mess of ads. Facebook.com can be made barely usable using a dedicated browser extension but their app is similarly 95% ads and “suggested content” and 5% actual content from your friends.
And then wait until the AI starts serving you ads, in which case you will be much worse off than with browsers as you will have zero say in your experience navigating the digital world. And some local/open source AI wont be a solution either, because scraping access to websites will be tailored to specific companies, similar to how last years a lot of platforms have closed their apis and essentially rendered useless most third-party clients.
GPT-4.5 hallucinates over 1/3 of its answers in benchmarks, so I don't think an OpenAI client will be able to replace browsers for knowledge acquisition anytime soon.
mainstream news sites are landfills of terrible banner ad tech. Once we can use AI for efficient scraping into e-paper interfaces, the smart people will migrate to a quieter luxury experience, probably something more modular than a browser.