The AI browser wars are heating up. OpenAI and different AI firms like Perplexity have gotten lots of consideration with their new AI-first and agentic browsers. They're being positioned as direct competitors to Google, which at present holds a 70% share of the market with its Chrome browser. Because the incumbent, Google has been slower to answer the shift towards AI search — integrating Gemini into Chrome, is extensively seen as taking part in catch-up to opponents that had been AI-first from day one.
It's comprehensible, as a $100 billion enterprise is a gigantic, unwieldy beast to pivot. That leaves area for the brand new guys to maneuver, who’re primarily beginning with clean slates, and free reign for innovation.
Enter Neo, launched for worldwide basic availability at this time — the following step in Norton’s AI innovation journey, constructing on its management in cyber security and its bid to ship the world’s first secure, zero-prompt AI browser. From the start, the minds behind Neo made a deliberate option to concentrate on a proactive AI assistant relatively than chase at this time’s agentic developments. Even fans prepared to tolerate the dangers face an excessive amount of unpredictability, together with new security and privateness issues.
Howie Xu, chief AI & innovation officer at Gen, describes Neo as a browser constructed to assist earlier than you ask — delivering on-page, in-flow help by summaries, reminders, and context-aware recommendations with out prompts or additional steps.
"It's like having a extremely smart assistant sitting subsequent to me, serving to me soak up and course of info rather more broadly, a lot sooner, a lot deeper," Xu says. "That assistant is there while you're studying, while you're researching, while you're engaged on a web-based mission. And primarily based in your pursuits and searching, your assistant will help you at each step."
Borrowing from Norton's distinctive client safety experience, privateness and security has additionally been built-in from the bottom up.
"What makes us distinctive is that we're giving individuals each peace of thoughts and AI performance on the identical time," Xu explains. "Norton’s roots are in safety. We’re the one sport on the town that constructed an AI native browser from the bottom up with security and privateness at its core —one which received’t exploit or use your knowledge for coaching.
The zero-prompt distinction
Comet (Perplexity) and Atlas (OpenAI) had been constructed by chat-first firms that assume customers will actively ask questions. However getting worth from AI takes cognitive effort: you must know what to ask, shift into “query mode,” and perceive what the mannequin can truly do. Asking a query isn’t the arduous half; realizing what to ask requires meta-cognition — consciousness of what you don’t know — which makes turning to ChatGPT in the course of searching really feel more durable than it ought to.
Neo takes the alternative method. As a substitute of ready so that you can immediate it, it acts first — providing summaries, reminders, related information, and even questions you’re prone to discover.
"Primarily based on my searching pursuits, Neo jogs my memory of occasions I’d wish to attend, surfaces personalised information, and presents pre-generated questions that I truly wish to discover," Xu explains. "In different phrases, I’ve by no means needed to formulate a single immediate — I’m merely clicking on insights the AI has already anticipated for me as if I had been prompting.”
As a result of most individuals don’t know the boundaries of AI expertise or the best way to phrase efficient prompts, anticipating them to drive the interplay is unrealistic for many individuals.
"We determined to shift the burden away from individuals. You’ll be able to nonetheless ask questions, in fact, however we’re designing for many who need much less cognitive load and like AI to take step one," he says. Very similar to the suggestions that floor on any information or retail website, Neo leverages searching context to floor the best content material on the proper second.
Neo can summarize a web page and anticipate questions primarily based in your pursuits and behaviors. With permission, it will probably additionally create detailed reminders — for instance, noticing repeat visits to Method 1 web sites and prompting you about upcoming races. Management stays with the individual utilizing Neo: if an curiosity fades, they’ll take away it from Neo’s Configurable Reminiscence.
As a result of Neo’s searching historical past and preferences are saved regionally and securely, it will probably customise prompts, insights, and recommendations — from calendar nudges to information suggestions to prompt questions within the Neo Chat interface. The result’s an AI-powered browser that offers individuals the advantages of AI with out typing prompts. Inline actions like “Abstract,” “Add to calendar?,” “Resume the place you left off,” and “Value dropped” make searching really feel sooner and lighter, with out additional steps.
A relaxed-by-design expertise grounded in safety
“Calm by design” has guided Neo’s growth, and for Xu that comes down to 3 issues: management, privateness, and safety, all inside a clear, streamlined expertise that makes searching sooner and simpler.
Rooted in Norton’s many years of safety experience, Neo’s calm expertise begins with privateness and safety. Xu views it because the bedrock of Neo’s method: the corporate by no means is aware of what you’re doing, as a result of all private knowledge stays on the machine until explicitly permitted in any other case.
Norton-backed safety practices suppress prompt-injection dangers widespread in different AI browsers, native processing retains delicate info contained, and scoped sync ensures solely user-approved context carries throughout gadgets.
Norton additionally brings deep net intelligence: many years of scanning the overwhelming majority of the web and evolving antivirus capabilities that now perceive each static and runtime net content material. That real-time perception permits Neo’s in-built antivirus, anti-phishing, and anti-scam expertise to detect and shut down malicious conduct and content material the second it seems.
"Once we take into consideration calm, what we actually imply is delivering worth in a constant approach, in a dependable approach, in a approach that folks can predict, so individuals have peace of thoughts," Xu says. "That is very completely different from the design of the agentic browsers on the market the place the result’s merely unpredictable, to not point out the related latency and overhead. I consider consistency is a necessity for us to push an AI browser to a mass inhabitants. We now have some flashy capabilities too, however our major purpose is that folks can simply use it of their each day lives with out ever having to fret about all of the vulnerabilities that almost all agentic browsers introduce. Since we're calm, dependable and secure by design, we consider we’ll win the hearts of a mass viewers."
For anybody watching the fast shift towards AI-powered searching, Neo exhibits how Norton is fusing help, safety, and zero-prompt design right into a single expertise. See it in motion at neobrowser.ai.
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