How much of what you do on the computer do it in the browser? Exact. A lot. We don’t think too much about it, but The browser is the application by antonomasia of our time. Not so much on the mobile, where native apps – which are often browsers disguised as something else – triumph, but of course in desktop and laptops.
The Internet has been the indirect guilty of this transformation of the browser in one of the pillars of our life. The greats of technology know it well, and for more than three decades they have tried to conquer with their browsers to dominate the world.
Of that mythical Netscape We become absolutely dominated by Microsoft Internet Explorerand after the occasional scarce with Firefox —Now in really low hours– We end up yielding to a Wonderful and disturbing Google Chrome. This company, by the way, was clear from the beginning how important the browser was. So much that they created an operating system absolutely focused on that idea: they called it Chrome Os.
During all this time, yes, there was something inherent to all those browsers: They were free. Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and of course Google gave them to us. They did not need to charge for them because they earned (and earned) a lot of money indirectly with their integration of search engines, especially Google’s. They tell Apple: Google pays about 20,000 million a year so that your search engine is the native in Safari. If you pay so much, imagine what you earn through the searches made by users of the iPhone, iPad or Mac.
Thus, using the browser has always been something we have done without thinking that it could cost us money.
That will change very soon.
Hello, subscription browser
And it will change because before us a new era opens in which browsers want to be much more than that. And to achieve this they have allied with AI models that allow interaction with websites to be much more powerful.
The promise of browsers with AI It is exceptional. One of the first, Perplexity Cometit autocalifies as “the browser that thinks with you.” Like him, browsers with AI are able to summarize that article that you are reading or answer questions about it, integrate conversational engines and little by little they are beginning to integrate something especially promising: AI agents What do things for us. That click alone and fill for forms and that they even overcome captchas without help.
But do that this time will not be free. Not at least if we want to use those options intensively. This is what The Browser Company is already raising, the company that first developed Arc and? He abandoned it To launch your own browser with the call day.
Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Companyhe confessed in An interview With The New York Times that in the coming weeks will launch subscription plans that will go from five dollars a month to hundreds of dollars a month, depending on how much users want to take advantage of the NA of the browser. There will still be a free version that will allow a limited use (probably very) of these options, but the future of this browser is not to be a browser, but to be a subscription browser.
The decision made by this company is totally logical: Using AI is not cheap, and using it is still less cheapso if you want to do it, you will have to pay. It is the same as we are seeing with the different models: Chatgpt, Gemini or Claude can be used for free, but if you want to use them intensively and access their most advanced options, it is time to pay by pointing to their subscription plans, as is the case with Chatgpt Plus, Google Ai Pro or Claude Pro respectively.
Browsers are already the most widespread way to interact with AI, so it is logical to think that all of them – Hello, Firefox? – will end up integrating these functions. He has done it day, he has done it, he just did it Edge with your co -pilot mode And it is expected that Integration between Gemini and Chrome So it is much more direct.
All of them will remain free in their basic versions. We can normally navigate as we have always done, but if we want to go further, if we want to use all those attractive AI options, Touch to pay a subscription. One that will be increasingly expensive.
We will have to go to the idea.
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