There are countless web browsers out there that you can choose from. There's bog-standard Chrome, there's Firefox, Floorp, Zen Browser, and so many others, but all of them are more or less the same. Deta Surf is an all-new browser (still based on Chromium though, mind you) that aims to change how you browse the web. It's currently in an invite-only alpha, but you can apply for an invite to try it out. It took me about a week to get my invite when I applied as a regular user (and not through any press channels).
This particular browser isn't one that I'd recommend using at the moment, but it's getting better and improving day by day. Its main selling point is AI (I know, I know, bear with me), but in a way that actually makes sense. It's not just AI for the sake of it; there are actual uses for it that make this particular browser pretty interesting, and I can already see myself beginning to browse in a different way than I normally would when I use it.
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I'm not exactly invested in AI; while I'm certainly less skeptical than a lot of people, I still harbor an immense amount of suspicion toward most of the companies touting AI as the next big thing. With that said, what Surf is doing is exactly the kind of way I believe this technology can be used. You can use it to help you understand something on a page, or find a piece of information that you might have missed. It even works on YouTube videos, as it can scrub the transcript of the video and find the answers to any questions you may have.
For example, I looked up a Finite State Machine diagram and highlighted the diagram to ask what it was. It understood what it was and explained it to me; while it takes into account the context of the tab that it was open in (which clearly states that it's an FSM), this is how you would likely come across most similarly technically inclined content. I then used it to help me understand a more obscure computer science concept, where Surf was able to explain the content in a way that made sense.
Of course, Surf isn't just using its own AI. When you write a prompt within the browser, it gets sent off to one of the following LLMs:
GPT-4o GPT-4o Mini o3 Mini Claude 3.7 Sonnet Claude 3.5 Sonnet Claude 3.5 Haiku Gemini 2.0 Flash
By default, Surf uses Claude 3.7 Sonnet. You can change where the prompt is sent when you are writing your prompt, but both o3 Mini and Gemini 2.0 Flash do not support vision at this point in time.
All of this is entirely free, though Deta intends to charge for these features in the future. While the browser is in alpha, everything is free, but you won't be able to use it for free forever. Max Eusterbrock, one of Deta's founders, compared Deta to apps like Obsidian in an interview with The Verge. You get basic features for free, but anything involving the cloud will cost money.
In Deta Surf, everything is context
When we talk about LLMs and "context", context is essentially everything that the LLM has access to outside of its own knowledge. If you ask a question, that's context. If you give information, that's context. In this case, your entire browser is context. You can choose your active tab, all of your tabs, or a section called "My Stuff" as context, and then ask a question accordingly.
For example, I opened a few tabs on Reddit, some relating to Nvidia, and then asked, using all of my tabs as context, what people think of Nvidia at the moment. It was able to highlight the tabs I had open related to Nvidia and tell me what they were about, where I could then click a citation to jump to that tab. For someone who is often guilty of having way too many tabs open, this is a genuinely useful feature that I can see being used to further improve one's browser organization. You can even create contexts filled with notes, saved webpages, and videos, so that you can base a prompt on a specific set of information.
What I'm most excited about is the organizational capabilities in the future. As a hypothetical, imagine if you could ask your browser to group all of your related tabs into different folders. I don't know if this is on the Surf to-do list or anything when it comes to development, but these are the kinds of features that this can heavily lean towards. AI-powered organization is a genuinely useful tool, which we've seen in the likes of NotebookLM. When everything about your browser is context, a proper understanding of that context can give an AI the power to restructure it.
Looking back to "My Stuff" as well, it's essentially a notebook inside your browser. You can store specific chats, links, images, and more, while also using it as a way to center your browsing on the internet. While it needs a lot of work at the moment, the concept behind it is pretty interesting. Surf Notes will also prompt you with suggestions for content if you ask it, and you can tag different contexts that you've created to use when creating a prompt. At the moment, I found that the option to automatically create a context didn't seem to pull in everything relevant (it offered suggestions where most of them just gave me an empty context), and saved chats don't save their citations; they just offer empty links that go to "Resource".
As I mentioned, though, this is an alpha release. There will be bugs, and it's not designed to be used as your everyday browser yet. You can sure try, but it's in a testing phase, and these kinds of problems are to be expected. I'm excited to see where it goes, and you can sign up for the alpha on Deta Surf's site.
