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Comment by Eriks | Hacker News Reader

Browsers are for browsing internet. So many of them are now turning into bloatware..

With the amount of synthetic content that is already on the internet, and with even more to come, I think we'll unfortunately need to find a way to automatically filter that content to only what is really relevant to us.

People are using AI to create incredible amounts of SEO content, to the point where just using Google to find something is becoming increasingly useless. If, on the other hand, you had an AI agent that automatically filtered out all of the noise, you could still find the real information you need. What would be even better is if the agent could learn about the things you find interesting, and the things you'd rather avoid.

Now the question is: do you want to have control over such agents and the data they need, or would you rather let some centralized entity manage them for you?

You are missing an important fact: the SEO team and the Generative team are being funded from the same pocket. So it highly unlikely that the generator will do anything similar to protecting the user from bigcorp's spam, ads, and dark interfaces.

Opera has leaned into this for decades. They have a long history of innovating in the browser space. I suppose that doesn’t happen without some bloat along the way. Not every idea is going to be a winner.

20 years ago, Opera had an email client built into the browser, for example.

I used Opera for quite a while back then, but eventually it became too much bloat, and I ended up switching to Phoenix (now Firefox) when it came out. I remember having a really hard time losing the mouse actions from Opera after the switch.

Opera copied Netscape which had email three years earlier (June '97 compared to Opera's June 2000) when groupware was still a thing in the 90s. Everyone except Opera realized the bundling of email and calendar and chat and more was wrong for most folks by around 2003 and pared back following Firefox and Safari to streamlined interfaces with only the most important features and leaving everything else to extensions. Opera (and MyIE/Maxthon) doubled down on bundling features until it was an unsustainable monstrosity and when that became clear the board kicked out the founder and not long after the CTO and inventor of CSS left and the Chinese now own it so it's just another Chromium skin.

I still don’t understand all the hype around Arc. I tried to use it but all its features just presented friction from browsing the web. I expect a browser (or any good product, for that matter) to just get out my way. It has some nice features (Split View, Spaces are a nice idea, although I don’t like vertical tabs). But like the parent comment said, it’s unnecessarily bloated.

Browsers are the most aligned virtual machine with support for scripting/programming and visualization.

And 'browsing the internet' sounds much different than 'doing nearly everything'

You are confusing the Internet with the web. You do not "browse" the Internet. Browser suites are for using the Internet, and the Netscape Suite provided numerous tools to use various protocols on the Internet. One of those happened to be a browser for browsing the web.

I say this to make it clear that the "now" in your comment ignores past and present browsers across all platforms.

You know damn well that people often use "internet" and "web" interchangeably.

I know, but it's important in this context.

"Browsers are for browsing internet. So many of them are now turning into bloatware."

This person is implying internet as only the web, when the reality is, suites would access more than just the web. To suggest they are "for browsing [web]" only is 100% wrong, and history shows them.

So, normally your comment would be appropriate, but it ignores context and the discussion at hand. Context is important, and you shouldn't ignore it.

FTP wasn't the web and browsers did that right in the main browser window using the primary addressing interface. RSS wasn't the web and web browsers rendered RSS in the main window and using the main addressing interface as well. Email isn't the web but Gmail is and browsers can seamlessly hand off several non-web formats to web clients where needed. Your distinction is real but also meaningless. If a user can do it in a browser, it's a part of the web. If a user cannot do it in a browser and requires a dedicated client, then it's not a part of the web.

Long time Opera user here.

I've been meaning to move to Vivaldi, and this AI crap was the push I needed.

You can't even highlight anything in Opera without getting 3 different AI tool suggestions. It's just too much.

I just made the jump from Opera to Brave after ~5 years of dailying Opera. I wasn't hugely put off by the AI popup; in fact, without the AI bits, the select popup was nice to quickly search something. For me the driving factor was Opera's shady business practices of "use our VPN/AI/whatever" and then harvest data from that.

Other than the recent(ish) UI redesign, though, Opera has solid UX. I will miss the interface, but Brave has most of what I want.

Brave is not much better either.

Brave browser installs a VPN service on Windows whether you want it or not. [1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/20/23925192/brave-browser-v...

I think it's better to look at it like the old AOL client? I've used Opera on and off for ~20 years, and in that time I've seen it strive to be more like a "Web OS"

I first used Opera in December of '96 and it's never tried to be an OS, not once. Mozilla tried it with FirefoxOS based on Gecko and Palm tried it with WebOS, heck even Microsoft tried with Trident somewhat, but no, Opera never tried with the Presto engine or Electra before that. What Opera did was bundle lots of features and offer a nice MDI interface before anyone had the superior tabbed browsing that Mozilla and Firefox popularized.

This hasn't been true since before IE6. ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, and beyond started the path of browser's being generic application hosts.

Nah, it was XHR which predates all of those plugins. ActiveX never went anywhere. Flash was good for FB games and YouTube video until browsers absorbed multimedia and animation. Silverlight was DOA in browsers. It was really IE's XHR (adopted by Mozilla in 2000) and then Mozilla's Dom Inspector and JS debuggers that started us down that path more than any of those plugins.

Opera was "bloatware" from the beginning. They call it integration, and when you do it well, it can be beneficial.

Or sheep in wolf's clothing – like Arc.

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Their PR narrative is mostly about being an ethical, user-first company. They’ve received a tonne of investment which is spent on expensive to maintain features like AI support in search.

Someone will have to pay the bill and the general attitude when it comes to monetising browsers are adtech partnerships, not subscriptions.

I think he meant to write wolf in sheep's clothing. It probably refers to their user-first marketing in contrast with their privacy issues and imminent enshittification to provide returns on VC money.

Opposite viewpoint: browsers are for much more than "browsing". It's been 10-20 years that browsers have become the only app many people ever use, on a computer. So they already almost do everything: video conferencing, instant messaging, editing documents, sending emails, image editors, video games, calendar management, etc

So at this point, frankly, "running a local LLM" is a pretty minor feature compared to the entire feature set of an average browser.

The video conferencing, messaging, document editing, and games are things browsers can load from an external source. That’s different than running it locally.

You forget the web browser standards had to be extended to add support for a lot of that stuff I mentioned:

- built-in support of USB webcam (for video conferencing)

- WebGL for video games

- XMLHTTPRequest to support active pages (email, calendar, etc)

- <canvas> for arbitrary 2D image (image editors, etc)

My point is that this stuff was not necessary either to simply "browse the internet". Browsers constantly evolve to provide more and more complex features beyond browsing.

My thinking is that those are additions developers can use to enable better experiences with a service hosted remotely. The local LLM seems like an end-user feature.

The local LLM feels like it could/should be its own app, separate from the browser. If the point of the local AI is not keep the users data local, it seems confusing to have it in the browser at all.

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