Not really if you are a Chromium fork. Difficult from ground-up but from Chromium it’s rather easy. Way easier than creating an LLM. Even easier when you can hire the Chromium developers.

You clearly think how they think. It's just so EASY to do. Practically done already. With an attitude like that how could they not succeed in tackling a really, really hard problem that requires nearly endless thankless investment?

He is talking common sense. Releasing a web browser on top of an existing one like Chromium is not rocket science.

I would urge you to reflect on your atitude. As the majority 'thinks how they think'. As we are right.

If it were rocket science it would be less surprising to me that they would want to be spending their time on it.

It's clear that they envy Google's position of owning a web browser (that everyone uses). But a play like this that involves entering a highly competitive with openly vicious level of scrutiny... Like, what would you say if Facebook announced that they were announcing that they would be starting their first hospital? That's a hypothetical, but IRL Amazon tried to convince people that they wanted to be operating a chain of hair salons. My point is that it was easy to tell from the outside that this was corporate whim and they weren't going to be very willing to put up with it for long if it turned out to be genuinely hard, because there just wasn't enough alignment with the mission.

So yeah, I've no trouble understanding why they want to own a browser in theory. And since they can print money and want to hoover up talent anyway, why not just hire some engs. It looks good for the company's future growth prospects if people do believe you're serious. But it just seems to me that thus far they've shown no real hard commitment, no philosophical alignment, and no appreciation for the reasons what they're doing is difficult: it's a social problem not just a hiring one

It's actually super easy. I modified Chromium's internal code myself to do what I wanted, I added some logic in C++ and then compiled it. It just works. They mainly want to gather more data and have access to more functionality, so the LLM agent isn't constrained by the plugin API etc. It's not really hard. They won't do any browser level stuff, instead they'll basically create their own plugin on top of Chromium with full access to everything, and that's it.

Like The Browser Company, that gave up on Arc to make Dia, an "AI browser" that's sure to have an equally short life.

I get that everyone wants to be a platform and to live where the user is all day, but getting folks to switch browsers is nearly impossible and, on Apple, fully impossible as only Safari-based browsers are permitted and those are highly restricted.