Google just fired back at the wave of AI-native browsers threatening Chrome's dominance. The company is embedding its Gemini assistant directly into a persistent sidebar and rolling out autonomous browsing capabilities that can shop, fill forms, and navigate websites on your behalf. After startups like The Browser Company and Perplexity spent 2025 launching AI-first browsers to chip away at Chrome's market share, Google is leveraging its scale and AI infrastructure to defend its territory. The move brings agentic AI features to Chrome's massive user base while keeping people inside Google's ecosystem.
Google isn't about to let scrappy startups redefine what a browser should be. The company just rolled out major AI updates to Chrome that transform the world's most popular browser into an autonomous assistant capable of handling complex web tasks without constant hand-holding.
The centerpiece is a redesigned Gemini integration that moves from a floating window into a persistent sidebar. Unlike the experimental version Google introduced last September, this sidebar stays anchored while you browse, ready to answer questions about whatever's on your screen. The real trick? It understands relationships between tabs.
When you open multiple tabs from a single page - say, comparing laptops or hunting for flight deals - Gemini treats them as a connected context group. Ask it to compare specs or find the cheapest option, and it analyzes everything you've got open without you copying and pasting between windows. It's the kind of quality-of-life improvement that sounds obvious once someone builds it.
Google is also expanding hardware support. The Gemini sidebar was previously limited to Windows and MacOS users, but Chromebook Plus owners can now access it too. That's a strategic play to make Chrome OS devices more compelling against traditional laptops.
