The AI browser wars are heating up. OpenAI and different AI corporations like Perplexity have gotten a whole lot of consideration with their new AI-first and agentic browsers. They're being positioned as direct competitors to Google, which at the moment holds a 70% share of the market with its Chrome browser. Because the incumbent, Google has been slower to reply to the shift towards AI search — integrating Gemini into Chrome, is extensively seen as enjoying catch-up to rivals that have been AI-first from day one.
It's comprehensible, as a $100 billion enterprise is a gigantic, unwieldy beast to pivot. That leaves house 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 immediately — the subsequent step in Norton’s AI innovation journey, constructing on its management in cyber security and its bid to ship the world’s first protected, zero-prompt AI browser. From the start, the minds behind Neo made a deliberate option to give attention to a proactive AI assistant quite than chase immediately’s agentic traits. Even fans keen to tolerate the dangers face an excessive amount of unpredictability, together with new security and privateness considerations.
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 assist by means of summaries, reminders, and context-aware solutions with out prompts or further steps.
"It's like having a very smart assistant sitting subsequent to me, serving to me take up and course of data way more broadly, a lot sooner, a lot deeper," Xu says. "That assistant is there once you're studying, once you're researching, once you're engaged on a web-based venture. And based mostly in your pursuits and searching, your assistant may also 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 folks each peace of thoughts and AI performance on the similar 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) have been constructed by chat-first corporations that assume customers will actively ask questions. However getting worth from AI takes cognitive effort: you want to know what to ask, shift into “query mode,” and perceive what the mannequin can truly do. Asking a query isn’t the onerous 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 tougher than it ought to.
Neo takes the other strategy. As an alternative of ready so that you can immediate it, it acts first — providing summaries, reminders, related information, and even questions you’re more likely to discover.
"Based mostly on my searching pursuits, Neo jogs my memory of occasions I would wish to attend, surfaces customized 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 know-how or learn how to phrase efficient prompts, anticipating them to drive the interplay is unrealistic for many individuals.
"We determined to shift the burden away from folks. You possibly can nonetheless ask questions, in fact, however we’re designing for individuals who need much less cognitive load and like AI to take step one," he says. Very like the suggestions that floor on any information or retail website, Neo leverages searching context to floor the suitable content material on the proper second.
Neo can summarize a web page and anticipate questions based mostly in your pursuits and behaviors. With permission, it could additionally create detailed reminders — for instance, noticing repeat visits to Components 1 web sites and prompting you about upcoming races. Management stays with the particular person 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 domestically and securely, it could customise prompts, insights, and solutions — from calendar nudges to information suggestions to prompt questions within the Neo Chat interface. The result’s an AI-powered browser that provides folks 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 further steps.
A relaxed-by-design expertise grounded in safety
“Calm by design” has guided Neo’s growth, and for Xu that comes down to a few 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 strategy: the corporate by no means is aware of what you’re doing, as a result of all private knowledge stays on the machine except explicitly permitted in any other case.
Norton-backed safety practices suppress prompt-injection dangers frequent in different AI browsers, native processing retains delicate data contained, and scoped sync ensures solely user-approved context carries throughout units.
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 know-how to detect and shut down malicious habits and content material the second it seems.
"Once we take into consideration calm, what we actually imply is delivering worth in a constant manner, in a dependable manner, in a manner that individuals can predict, so folks 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’ve some flashy capabilities too, however our major aim is that individuals can simply use it of their day by 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 protected by design, we consider we’ll win the hearts of a mass viewers."
For anybody watching the fast shift towards AI-powered searching, Neo reveals 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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