If you’re concerned that your favorite may be subsumed by the growing wave of AI, Vivaldi would like you to know they plan to resist.
Vivaldi, the small Norwegian-made browser which I use as an alternative to more mainstream browsers like Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, said it plans to “choose humans over hype,” in the words of Jon von Tetzchner, the company’s chief executive.
“We’re taking a stand, choosing humans over hype, and we will not turn the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship,” von Tetzchner said in a statement, shared by the company. “Without exploration, the web becomes far less interesting. Our curiosity loses oxygen and the diversity of the web dies.”
To be fair, Vivaldi reportedly employs just 150 people. Anthropic, whose AI browser, is one of a number of browsers designed around agentic AI, reportedly employs over well over 1,000 — meaning that it’s possible that VIvaldi’s statement simply means that it lacks the capability to keep up, anyway. On the other hand, Opera (which employs about 600 people and was co-founded by von Tetzchner) has managed to publish several browsers as well as Opera Neon, an agentic browser the company debuted in May.
Agentic browsers not only provide access to an AI chatbot, but also use smaller “independent” small-language model (SLM) tools to perform tasks independently, such as researching hotel options for a planned trip. Vivaldi said it will not be using an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine “until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.”
“If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it,” von Tetzchner said in a blog post. “If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not.”
In the post, von Tetzchner noted the dangers of AI browsing, such as injecting “AI modes” into Google Chrome which simply copies content from creators’ web sites and presents it as Google’s own, with tiny link icons which connect to the original sites. Microsoft Edge, he said, can be used to summarize the content of a Web page, “reshaping the address bar into an assistant prompt, turning the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship.”
Perplexity’s Comet, The Browser Co. of New York’s Dia, and GenSpark are some of the new browsers which have also chosen an AI path.
“The next phase of the browser wars is not about tab speed, it is about who intermediates knowledge, who benefits from attention, who controls the pathway to information, and who gets to monetize you,” von Tetzchner said.