https://www.protocol.com/browser-company
The browser tab is an underrated thing. Most people think of them only when there are too many, when their computer once again buckles under Chrome's weight. Even the developers who build the tabs — the engineers and designers working on Chrome, Firefox, Brave and the rest — haven't done much to them. The internet has evolved in massive, earth-shaking ways over the last two decades, but tabs haven't really changed since they became a browser feature in the mid '90s.
Josh Miller, however, has big plans for browser tabs. Miller is the CEO of a new startup called The Browser Company, and he wants to change the way people think about browsers altogether. He sees browsers as operating systems, and likes to wonder aloud what "iOS for the web" might look like. What if your browser could build you a personalized news feed because it knows the sites you go to? What if every web app felt like a native app, and the browser itself was just the app launcher? What if you could drag a file from one tab to another, and it just worked? What if the web browser was a shareable, synced, multiplayer experience? It would be nothing like the simple, passive windows to the web that browsers are now. Which is exactly the goal.
The Browser Company (which everyone on the team just calls Browser) is one of a number of startups that are rethinking every part of the browser stack. Mighty has built a version of Chrome that runs on powerful server hardware and streams the browser itself over the web. Brave is building support for decentralized protocols like IPFS, and experimenting with using cryptocurrencies as a new business model for publishers. Synth is building a new bookmarks system that acts more like a web-wide inbox. Sidekick offers a vertical app launcher and makes tabs easier to organize. "A change is coming," said Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker. "The question is just the time frame, and what's actually required to make it happen."
They have lots of different ideas, but they share a belief that the browser can, and should, be more than it is. "We don't need a new web browser," Miller said. "We need a new successor to the web browser."
Miller and co-founder Hursh Agrawal started The Browser Company together in 2019. The pair had worked together before, founding Branch in 2011 before selling it to Facebook in 2014. Eventually, both left Facebook to do other things: Agrawal founded and worked at a number of startups, Miller was the director of product at the Obama White House before joining Thrive Capital as an investor.
The email Miller sent to Agrawal that kicked off their plan to reinvent browsers.
Photo: Josh Miller
While he was at the White House, Chief Digital Officer (and Miller's boss) Jason Goldman said something Miller couldn't forget. "Platforms have all the leverage," is how Miller remembers it. "And if you care about the future of the internet, or the way we use our computers, or want to improve any of the things that are broken about technology … you can't really just build an application. Platforms, whether it's iOS or Windows or Android or Mac OS, that's where all the control is."
Later, at Thrive, Miller noticed something else. Companies like Figma, Notion, Airtable and Superhuman weren't going mobile- or desktop-first, but were building powerful, collaborative apps with web technologies. Their "native apps," in most cases, were just wrappers around their web apps, plus a homescreen icon.
Miller became convinced that the next big platform was right in front of his face: the open web. The underlying infrastructure worked, the apps were great, there were no tech giants in the way imposing rules and extracting huge commissions. The only thing missing was a tool to bring it all together in a user-friendly way, and make the web more than the sum of its parts.
Of course, there's a reason that tool doesn't exist. Generally speaking, internet users use one of two browsers: the one that came on their device or Google Chrome. Chrome owns about two-thirds of the browser market and continues to grow, while its competitors all have single-digit share and most continue to shrink. Many users complain about Chrome's performance issues and Google's massive data collection, but Chrome has effectively won the browser market. Other browsers now use Chrome's underlying engine, Chromium, and copy its interface because it's what everyone knows.
Ironically, Chrome was also designed for the exact future Browser imagines. "We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser," Sundar Pichai wrote in a 2008 blog post announcing Chrome. "What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build."
Chrome, circa 2009. Some things have changed since, but only slightly.
Photo: Internet Archive
But Google made one crucial decision in the Chrome development process. It built Chrome to get out of the way. "To most people, it isn't the browser that matters," Pichai wrote in 2008. "It's only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web." Even when Google launched Chrome OS, it merely grafted that out-of-the-way browser onto a lightweight desktop OS. Google built a near-perfect version of the browser Netscape imagined 20 years earlier, but it didn't reinvent anything.