A protein called TRAILshort may act as a central immune brake that limits T-cell responses and CAR-T therapy. Cancer cells can weaken the immune system by producing a protein that prevents its most important defenders from attacking. Mayo Clinic researchers have identified how this protein works, revealing a possible target for treatments designed to improve [...]
Four weeks ago, San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was involved in an accident near downtown Palo Alto. At the time Shanahan said only that the accident was his fault. But during a recent press conference he shared more details about the incident, including the fact that he had his Tesla's Autopilot engaged at the time. Shanahan was not passing the buck, however, saying it was his fault regardless of whether or not Autopilot was engaged.
"I've had Autopilot for nine years, so I'm pretty comfortable with it and, you know, who knows what happened when I turned around? Whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off? That's somethi …
Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System, but most of the distance from its centre to its surface passes through metal. NASA puts the radius of Mercury’s metallic core at about 2,074 kilometres, compared with a planetary radius of 2,440 kilometres. That is roughly 85 per cent of the planet’s radius.
The percentage needs reading carefully. It describes radius, not volume, and it does not mean the remaining 15 per cent is all crust. NASA estimates that Mercury’s combined rocky mantle and crust are about 400 kilometres thick. There is also evidence that part of the core remains molten or liquid, which helps explain how such a small world still generates a magnetic field.
I find the surface consequence more revealing than the ratio itself. As Mercury lost interior heat, the planet contracted. Its rigid outer shell had to fit around a slightly smaller interior, so parts of the crust broke and were pushed over neighbouring ground. The result is a global population of long, curved cliffs that record the cooling of the planet below them.
Mercury’s bulk density is second only to Earth’s among the planets. Yet Earth gains much of its density from the intense pressure produced by its greater mass. Mercury is genuinely rich in metal for its size.
Its internal arrangement is not simply a solid iron ball wrapped in stone. Measurements of Mercury’s gravity, rotation and magnetic field from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft indicate a layered interior, including a metallic core that is at least partly liquid. The exact composition and boundaries of those layers remain subjects of active modelling.
The reason Mercury ended up with so much metal is also unsettled. Proposed explanations have included the loss of rocky material during an early collision, extreme heating near the young Sun and formation from unusually metal-rich starting material. None has closed the case by itself. The core size is measured far more securely than the story of how it formed.
Materials generally contract as they cool. On Mercury, that gradual loss of interior heat reduced the planet’s volume enough to deform its outer shell. Because the crust could not slide neatly into a smaller sphere, compression forced blocks of rock up and over one another along thrust faults.
Planetary geologists call many of the resulting landforms lobate scarps. “Lobate” describes their rounded, lobe-like shape, while a scarp is a steep slope or cliff produced by fault movement. These are not mainly cliffs carved by rivers, waves or glaciers. They are the surface expression of crustal shortening.
The scale can be hard to read in spacecraft photographs with no trees or buildings for comparison. NASA reports that the largest scarps extend for hundreds of kilometres and rise more than 1.5 kilometres in places. A traveller approaching one would face a landform longer than many terrestrial mountain ranges, even though Mercury’s entire diameter is only 4,880 kilometres.
Mariner 10 revealed Mercury’s great scarps during three flybys in 1974 and 1975, but it photographed less than half the planet. MESSENGER changed the picture after becoming the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury in 2011.
Using global photographs and topographic measurements, the mission team mapped almost 6,000 ridges and scarps. A 2014 analysis concluded that Mercury’s radius had decreased by as much as seven kilometres as the interior cooled, a substantially larger contraction than researchers had inferred from the incomplete Mariner 10 coverage. NASA’s global map of those structures shows them spread across the planet rather than confined to one basin or hemisphere.
Seven kilometres is small beside Mercury’s present radius, about three-tenths of one per cent. Across a whole planet, however, that change is enough to build thousands of faults and folds. The cliffs are an accumulated record of strain, not evidence that the planet suddenly collapsed.
The broad contraction began billions of years ago. The harder question is when it stopped, if it has stopped at all.
During MESSENGER’s final 18 months, the spacecraft flew lower and returned sharper images. Researchers identified small, crisp scarps that should not have survived for billions of years under constant impacts from meteoroids. A 2016 study interpreted some as younger than 50 million years, a short interval in planetary geology.
A later 2023 paper in Nature Geoscience, led by Benjamin Man, mapped small troughs called grabens on top of larger contraction structures. The researchers identified 190 examples they regarded as certain. They measured them at roughly 10 to 150 metres deep, generally less than one kilometre wide and tens of kilometres long.
The team estimated that the grabens were about 300 million years old or younger because continued impact debris would otherwise have softened or buried such shallow features. Their distribution was consistent with prolonged contraction and activity on the larger faults into geologically recent times.
This is evidence, not a direct measurement of a fault moving today. The 2023 result is one study, not settled consensus about present activity, and no seismometer has yet recorded a Mercury-quake. The careful claim is that the planet appears to have cooled and contracted for much longer than an old, small world might suggest.
MESSENGER ended with a planned impact on Mercury in April 2015. The next orbital investigation is now approaching. According to the European Space Agency’s current mission schedule, BepiColombo’s European and Japanese orbiters are due to enter Mercury orbit together on 21 November 2026 and separate in December.
The mission carries a laser altimeter, cameras, a magnetometer, radio-science equipment and instruments designed to examine surface composition and temperature. Combining topography with gravity and magnetic measurements should improve estimates of the core’s structure and Mercury’s rocky shell. Higher-resolution surface observations may also reveal whether the smallest scarps and grabens are more widespread than MESSENGER could see.
BepiColombo will not make billions of years of cooling easy to reconstruct. It will give researchers a second global orbital dataset, collected with different instruments, for testing whether Mercury’s thin shell is still adjusting to the metal-rich world beneath it.
Mercury’s core cannot be photographed directly, and the planet’s surface gives few obvious hints of an interior that fills 85 per cent of its radius. The cliffs connect the two. Their lengths, heights, ages and fault geometry preserve part of the history of heat leaving the core and mantle.
That history is still incomplete. The measured contraction is real, the young-looking structures are real, and the possibility of present tectonic activity remains open. Mercury’s grey surface is not merely an old impact record. It is also the outer skin of a planet that has spent billions of years fitting itself around a slowly cooling core.
The post Mercury is the Solar System’s smallest planet, but its metallic core fills about 85 per cent of its radius, leaving a rocky shell so thin that cooling has crumpled the surface into cliffs hundreds of kilometres long appeared first on Space Daily.
Conheça a visão da Nough Studio para o futuro após o sucesso de Lies of P, um RPG Souls-like cheio de desafio e emoção.
O post Nough Studio revela detalhes do próximo jogo após sucesso de Lies of P apareceu primeiro em Blog do Edivaldo - Informações e Notícias sobre Linux.
Samsung lo ha confermato ufficialmente: i Galaxy Tab S12 stanno arrivando, e lo stesso vale per Galaxy S26 FE (con buone probabilità che il lancio sia congiunto o quasi). Ma non ha detto esattamente ancora quando, né ha rivelato nulla su specifiche e design: per fortuna, però, rumor e leak non mancano. E col debutto che si fa sempre più vicino - settembre dovrebbe essere il mese giusto, guardando alle tempistiche con cui l'azienda ha lanciato i predecessori - l'identikit di Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra e Galaxy Tab S12+ si fa sempre più nitido e dettagliato.
L'immagine condivisa oggi dal portale Sammyguru ci fornisce conferme del design del modello Ultra, che era già filtrato in alcuni render a luglio, e anche di quello di Galaxy Tab S12+.
In entrambi i casi abbiamo una vista frontale: e intendiamoci, in questo senso tutti i tablet sono uguali o quasi. Di sicuro questi nuovi modelli sono in perfetta continuità con la generazione precedente: si può giusto giudicare ad occhio lo spessore delle cornici, che sembra invariato rispetto a Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra e Galaxy Tab S11+.
Local government resistance to data center development accelerated this summer, a warning sign for big AI companies such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI that are pinning their compute ambitions on data center expansion.
In July alone, more than 150 towns and counties passed temporary or permanent bans on data centers, many adopted in emergency meetings. That brings the nationwide total to more than 500 active data center bans at the start of August, according to The Information’s analysis of thousands of legal documents and local news reports. When we first published our tracker of these bans in late June, we had found more than 300.
A steady daily routine may quietly protect the body from pain, depression, and the damaging effects of disrupted sleep. A University of Missouri study suggests that a predictable routine may support physical and emotional health by helping the body keep time. Rather than focusing only on sleep, the researchers examined the broader pattern of activities [...]Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman wrote today that Apple is planning a return of the much-beloved ceramic Apple Watch. In fact, Gurman says a new ceramic Watch could go on sale as soon as this year.
The ceramic watch option was last offered in 2019 as the ‘Apple Watch Edition Series 5’, back when it still used the Edition branding for its more premium watches featuring higher-end materials.
Voyager 1’s power test came back at the end of July, and by Kareem Badaruddin’s own account it went about as well as an engineer could hope. Badaruddin is the Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and what he’s describing is the early stage of an attempt to do for Voyager 1 what a nearly identical procedure just did for its twin, Voyager 2: buy a dying power supply another year of science, on a spacecraft nobody can reach, touch, or send a spare part to.
I wrote a while back about the sliver of plutonium that’s kept both Voyagers running for close to half a century, and this is really that same story arriving at its next decision point. Voyager 1 needs the fix worse than Voyager 2 did. It has less power in reserve, it’s already lost more of its original instruments, and in February this year it came close to tripping its own emergency shutdown during a routine manoeuvre. Whether the fix behaves the same way on Voyager 1 as it did on Voyager 2 is, as of this week, still an open question, and NASA’s own engineers have said they’re not entirely sure of the answer.
Voyager 1 currently has two working science instruments left: a magnetometer and a plasma wave subsystem. Voyager 2 has three. Both spacecraft launched in 1977 with ten identical instrument sets, mostly built for flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that wrapped up decades ago, and both have been shedding instruments ever since, in an order the mission’s engineers settled on years in advance.
Voyager 1’s most recent loss came in April, when NASA switched off its Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, the instrument that had measured ions, electrons and cosmic rays almost continuously since launch. The shutdown wasn’t part of the planned sequence running ahead of schedule. It was prompted by an unexpected power dip during a roll manoeuvre on 27 February, one that brought Voyager 1 close enough to its automatic undervoltage fault protection that engineers chose to retire the instrument rather than risk a shutdown they hadn’t chosen themselves. A small motor inside the instrument, using half a watt, was deliberately left running, specifically so the whole thing could be switched back on if the power situation ever improved.
The fix both probes are attempting is nicknamed the Big Bang inside the mission, and the name refers to how it’s done rather than what it does. Rather than switching off one low-priority load at a time, engineers turn off several ageing devices at once, tape recorders and heaters that had been drawing power for decades, and replace them in the same moment with lower-power alternatives, all while keeping the spacecraft’s electronics above the temperature at which they’d fail for good. On Voyager 2, the swap went ahead in July and freed up close to ten watts a year, enough to keep its three remaining instruments running for at least another year.
Voyager 1 is next, and this is the part I find genuinely interesting rather than just procedurally interesting. Badaruddin has said plainly that although the two spacecraft were built to the same design, the team has observed real differences between them after forty-nine years of separate flight. That’s not a small caveat. It means a fix that worked cleanly on one twin isn’t guaranteed to work the same way on the other, even though the hardware started out identical. Voyager 1 is also farther out, more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth compared with Voyager 2’s roughly 21 billion, which means a command takes close to a day to arrive and just as long for confirmation to come back.
The power test Voyager 1 passed at the end of July checked whether the swap would draw more electricity than expected. The next hurdle is a thermal test, provisionally scheduled for the end of August, which checks whether the spacecraft’s temperature holds inside safe limits once the swap is made, since a heater or an electronic component that drops too cold in interstellar space doesn’t recover. If that goes well, the actual implementation on Voyager 1 follows, on the same cautious timeline that governs everything the mission does now, where a single command takes close to a day just to arrive.
There’s a genuinely hopeful detail sitting at the end of all this. If the fix frees up enough power on Voyager 1, NASA has said there’s a real chance the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment could be switched back on, not replaced, the same physical instrument, resuming measurements it’s been taking since 1977. I don’t want to overstate that. It depends on results NASA hasn’t published yet, and the agency has been careful not to promise it. But it’s the kind of small reversal that doesn’t happen often in a mission that has otherwise been a long, one-way process of turning things off.
Two dates sit ahead of each other on the calendar. The thermal test is due by the end of this month, and Voyager 1 is separately expected to cross one light-day from Earth in mid-November, a distance at which a signal travelling at the speed of light takes a full day to arrive. Neither date guarantees anything about the other. But together they’re a reasonable way to think about where this mission actually is: still capable of a genuine engineering surprise, still adding distance every second, and still, forty-nine years on, being managed one careful decision at a time by people who can’t see it, can’t touch it, and have learned to work within that.
The post Voyager 1 is down to two working science instruments, and the fix that just bought its twin, Voyager 2, another year of power is now being tested on a probe NASA says no longer behaves quite like its sibling appeared first on Space Daily.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman goes into some detail today about the future for the Apple Watch product line.
He suggests Apple is going back to the drawing board as the Watch faces stiffer competition from the likes of the Oura Ring and other screenless smart fitness devices. It seems Apple is preparing to revamp the concept of the Apple Watch from the ground up …
According to the latest edition of the Power On newsletter, Apple had reportedly been considering a feature for Apple Upgrade that would’ve made setting up your iPhone nearly seamless: where Apple would’ve already copied your data over. This feature never ended up seeing the light of day, though.
Murena 4.1.1 traz backup criptografado, migração do Google segura e novas ferramentas para proteger seus dados. Veja como aproveitar.
O post Murena 4.1.1: descubra as novidades que aumentam sua privacidade e controle apareceu primeiro em Blog do Edivaldo - Informações e Notícias sobre Linux.
Igeekphone News August 8, 2026 — Xiaomi is reportedly developing a custom 200-megapixel 1-inch camera sensor for its next-generation flagship smartphones, potentially setting the stage for another major leap in mobile photography.
According to information shared by a Chinese tech blogger, Xiaomi has customized a new 200MP sensor with a 1-inch optical format. Interestingly, the sensor is said to use an aspect ratio different from the traditional 4:3 format commonly found on smartphone image sensors.
The blogger also suggested that Xiaomi could potentially skip the rumored Xiaomi 18 Ultra, meaning the new sensor may not debut until the Xiaomi 19 Ultra.
If the report proves accurate, Xiaomi could once again be preparing to push the boundaries of smartphone camera hardware, particularly in the increasingly competitive ultra-premium flagship segment.
Xiaomi has a strong history with large-format smartphone camera sensors.
In July 2022, the company introduced the Xiaomi 12S Ultra, which became the first commercially available smartphone to use Sony’s IMX989 1-inch mobile image sensor.
The sensor was jointly developed by Xiaomi and Sony, with the two companies reportedly sharing the development costs equally.
At the time, Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun said the company would make the sensor available to other smartphone manufacturers after its own launch. The move helped accelerate the adoption of large-format camera sensors throughout the smartphone industry.
The main advantage of a larger image sensor is its ability to capture more light.
In general, a larger photosensitive area can collect more light during an exposure, which can improve image quality, particularly in challenging lighting conditions.
The Sony IMX989 used in the Xiaomi 12S Ultra featured a Quad Bayer pixel architecture with individual pixels measuring approximately 1.6 microns. Through pixel binning, four adjacent pixels can be combined to produce an effective pixel size of around 3.2 microns.
This design allows the sensor to gather significantly more light while maintaining strong image detail.
Compared with the sensor used in the iPhone 13 Pro Max, the IMX989 was reported to provide a substantially larger photosensitive area and improved light-gathering capability.
The difference becomes particularly noticeable in low-light photography, where larger sensors can help produce cleaner images with less noise and improved dynamic range.
The 1-inch sensor strategy has remained an important part of Xiaomi’s Ultra-series photography philosophy.
Last year, Xiaomi introduced the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, which reportedly continued the company’s use of a 1-inch-class main camera sensor.
This made it unusual among Android flagship smartphones in the same premium category, as several competing manufacturers moved toward other sensor formats and multi-camera configurations rather than continuing with a 1-inch main sensor.
Xiaomi’s willingness to maintain the large-sensor approach suggests that the company sees sensor size as an important differentiator in the premium smartphone market.
The rumored new sensor could represent an even more ambitious approach.
A 200MP resolution combined with a 1-inch sensor would provide Xiaomi with a significantly higher native pixel count while retaining the light-gathering advantages associated with a large sensor.
However, resolution and sensor size alone do not determine image quality.
The final results would also depend on the sensor’s pixel architecture, pixel size, readout technology, lens design, image signal processor, computational photography algorithms, autofocus system, and image-processing software.
A 200MP sensor could nevertheless offer several potential advantages.
At native resolution, it could capture a large amount of image information. Through pixel binning, it could also generate lower-resolution images with larger effective pixels, potentially improving low-light performance while maintaining sufficient detail.
The combination could give Xiaomi greater flexibility between high-resolution photography and computationally enhanced low-light shooting.
Another intriguing detail from the leak is that the rumored sensor reportedly does not use the traditional 4:3 aspect ratio.
Most smartphone camera sensors are designed around a 4:3 native imaging format, although manufacturers can crop images into other aspect ratios.
A different native aspect ratio could indicate that Xiaomi is pursuing a customized sensor architecture designed specifically around its imaging system.
At this stage, however, there is not enough information to determine exactly how the unusual aspect ratio would affect the camera experience.
It could be related to image composition, sensor utilization, cropping flexibility, or integration with a particular lens and camera module.
The timing of the rumored sensor is also noteworthy.
The blogger reportedly hinted that the Xiaomi 18 Ultra may not launch, which would potentially push the debut of the new 200MP 1-inch sensor to a future Xiaomi 19 Ultra.
That means the rumored sensor could be several product cycles away from commercial availability.
As with other unconfirmed smartphone leaks, the final product name, launch schedule, sensor specifications, and camera configuration could all change before an official announcement.
Xiaomi has not publicly confirmed the existence of the rumored 200MP 1-inch sensor.
Xiaomi’s progression in large-format mobile photography is worth watching.
The Xiaomi 12S Ultra demonstrated that a 1-inch sensor could be successfully integrated into a mass-market smartphone. Since then, large camera sensors have become increasingly common among premium Android devices.
A move to a customized 200MP 1-inch sensor would represent another step in that evolution.
Rather than simply adopting an off-the-shelf component, Xiaomi could be moving toward more extensive control over sensor design and imaging hardware.
That approach could become increasingly important as smartphone camera competition shifts from simply increasing megapixel counts to optimizing the entire imaging pipeline.
If Xiaomi successfully commercializes the rumored sensor, it could potentially offer several advantages:
However, the real-world performance will depend heavily on Xiaomi’s lens, image processing, autofocus technology, and software tuning.
Xiaomi has already played a significant role in bringing 1-inch camera sensors into mainstream smartphones, and the reported development of a custom 200MP 1-inch sensor suggests that the company may be preparing another ambitious move in mobile imaging.
If the rumors surrounding the Xiaomi 18 Ultra’s absence prove correct, the sensor could eventually debut with the Xiaomi 19 Ultra, potentially giving the company’s next Ultra flagship a major camera advantage.
The most interesting aspect may not be the 200MP resolution itself, but the combination of very high resolution, a 1-inch sensor format, and a customized aspect ratio.
For now, the technology remains unconfirmed. But if Xiaomi can successfully bring such a sensor to market and pair it with strong optics and computational photography, the Xiaomi 19 Ultra could become one of the most ambitious camera phones in its generation.
The post Xiaomi Reportedly Developing Custom 200MP 1-Inch Camera Sensor for Future Ultra Flagship appeared first on IGeeKphone China Phone, Tablet PC, VR, RC Drone News, Reviews.
The SNP gave £227,386 to a charity so it could set up a 'conversion therapy' helpline that LGBT people at risk of being converted could call. It got just four calls, meaning each call cost the Scottish taxpayer £56,846.50.
The post SNP Spent £227,000 of Taxpayers’ Money on ‘Conversion Therapy’ Helpline That Received Just Four Calls appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Soplos Linux 2026.08 traz avanços em suporte a hardware e ferramentas exclusivas. Veja por que essa versão vai além do básico.
O post Soplos Linux 2026.08: descubra as novidades e o desempenho otimizado hoje apareceu primeiro em Blog do Edivaldo - Informações e Notícias sobre Linux.
Igeekphone News August 9, 2026 — When OpenAI launched its AI-native browser ChatGPT Atlas on October 21, 2025, the global technology industry quickly gave it a dramatic nickname: the “Chrome killer.”
It was an understandable description. OpenAI was entering one of the oldest and most entrenched layers of the internet with a browser built around AI agents rather than conventional tabs, bookmarks, and search. At the time, many observers believed the browser was finally ready for a major transformation.
The launch also triggered a rush among AI-browser startups. Several companies accelerated their own product releases, concerned that OpenAI’s enormous user base and brand recognition would otherwise overwhelm them.
But less than a year later, the story has taken a very different turn.
On August 9, 2026, just 292 days after Atlas launched, OpenAI discontinued the browser. Users were instructed to export their bookmarks before the shutdown, effectively marking the end of an experiment that was supposed to redefine how people interacted with the web.
The irony is difficult to miss: A company that set out to reinvent the browser ultimately had to teach its users how to migrate back to Chrome.
The most striking part of the AI-browser story is that Chrome did not need a major counterattack.
Despite the arrival of numerous AI-powered browsers over the past year, Chrome’s global market share remained remarkably stable at roughly two-thirds. Depending on the measurement source, there were fluctuations, but the overall change remained relatively small.
Meanwhile, the combined market share of AI browsers remained below 1% in many browser statistics.
That gap is especially revealing when comparing the distribution of the underlying products.
ChatGPT had already reached a weekly active user base of hundreds of millions, giving OpenAI one of the world’s largest consumer software audiences. Yet Atlas struggled to convert that enormous audience into browser users at anything close to the same scale.
The problem was not necessarily that Atlas was technologically weak.
The problem was that the browser is one of the hardest consumer software categories to replace.
Switching browsers means moving bookmarks, saved passwords, extensions, payment information, browsing habits and countless small interactions that users have accumulated over years.
By comparison, adding an AI capability to an existing browser can be almost effortless.
The challenger asks users to move their digital lives.
The incumbent only needs to add a new feature.
That is an extremely uneven starting position.
Browser competition has never been purely about technical specifications.
For most people, a browser is infrastructure. Once a user becomes comfortable with a particular browser, there is little motivation to switch unless the alternative provides a dramatic improvement.
This is also why distribution has historically been more important than browser innovation itself.
Google’s long-running payments to secure default search placement on Apple devices illustrate how valuable the default entry point can be. The browser is not simply a piece of software; it is a gateway to the internet and a powerful distribution channel.
AI-browser startups therefore faced a fundamental problem.
They were attempting to replace a deeply embedded gateway rather than simply introduce a better AI assistant.
And the rise of mobile computing made that challenge even harder.
Another weakness of the AI-browser movement was its heavy focus on desktop computing.
Many of the products that attracted attention were initially designed around desktop workflows. Atlas itself remained a macOS-only product throughout its short life.
That created a significant strategic limitation.
The modern internet is no longer primarily a desktop experience. Smartphones account for a huge portion of global browsing activity, and mobile users have their own established browser ecosystems.
Trying to replace Chrome while failing to establish a meaningful presence across mobile platforms meant that AI browsers were effectively fighting over only part of the market.
In other words, they were trying to capture the browser category without controlling the places where much of the world’s browsing actually happens.
Perhaps the most important lesson from the past year is that AI dramatically shortened the advantage normally enjoyed by innovative startups.
AI browsers introduced features such as:
These features initially looked like compelling reasons to switch browsers.
But the major browser companies quickly began incorporating similar capabilities into their existing products.
Google brought Gemini deeper into Chrome, while Microsoft expanded Copilot capabilities within Edge.
That fundamentally changed the competitive landscape.
A startup might spend months building an AI-powered browser experience. A platform company with an existing browser could potentially introduce a similar capability through a software update.
This undermined one of the traditional advantages of startups: the window of time between invention and imitation.
The classic “innovator’s dilemma” assumes that established companies may be reluctant to disrupt their existing businesses.
But AI browsers presented a different situation.
AI features did not necessarily threaten the core browser businesses of Google or Microsoft. As a result, incumbents had little reason to ignore the trend.
They could simply absorb the innovation.
And once the most attractive AI features became available inside existing browsers, the incentive to switch largely disappeared.
Chrome did not need to defeat the challengers.
It simply absorbed their best ideas.
That brings us to perhaps the most important conclusion from the collapse of the independent AI-browser boom.
The surviving products are generally not trying to make money from the browser alone.
Consider the different business models emerging around the category.
Perplexity’s Comet can function as an extension of its AI subscription ecosystem and a way to acquire users.
Dia, developed by The Browser Company and later acquired by Atlassian, can become part of a broader productivity and workplace software strategy.
Opera Neon has positioned itself as a premium AI browser with a subscription model, while smaller products can depend heavily on venture capital to finance development.
The common denominator is clear:
The browser is rarely the business itself.
Instead, it is becoming a distribution mechanism for another business.
It can acquire customers, provide access to AI services, extend a productivity platform, or serve as another interface for an existing ecosystem.
This represents a fundamental challenge to the idea of the independent AI-browser company.
The browser category will survive.
But the idea that dozens of standalone companies can build businesses simply by creating “a better AI browser” looks increasingly difficult to sustain.
There is also a precedent for this development in China.
Rather than creating entirely new browsers specifically for the AI era, major technology companies have generally taken existing products and gradually integrated AI capabilities into them.
Alibaba has continued evolving its existing consumer software toward AI-powered work and productivity experiences. Tencent has integrated AI into established products such as QQ Browser, while 360 has incorporated AI capabilities into its security-focused browser ecosystem.
The pattern is consistent:
Existing products become AI products.
The browser remains the shell, while AI becomes the capability inside it.
That is almost the opposite of the strategy pursued by many independent AI-browser startups in 2025.
Atlas’s shutdown does not necessarily mean OpenAI has abandoned browser-based AI.
In fact, the company’s next strategy may be more important than Atlas itself.
Rather than maintaining a separate browser, OpenAI can take the most valuable capabilities developed for Atlas and distribute them through other products.
Some of Atlas’s functionality has reportedly moved into the desktop ChatGPT experience, including browser automation capabilities that allow AI agents to interact with websites on a user’s behalf.
Other capabilities can be delivered through a Chrome extension.
This represents a fundamental change in strategy.
OpenAI no longer needs to convince hundreds of millions of people to abandon their existing browser.
It can simply bring its agent into the browser they already use.
And that could be a much more powerful approach.
The first generation of AI browsers asked a relatively simple question:
What if we built a browser around AI from the beginning?
The next generation is asking something much more consequential:
What if AI could operate the browser for you?
That distinction matters.
The future competition may not be about which browser has the smartest sidebar or the most attractive new-tab page.
Instead, it may be about which AI agent can successfully perform tasks across the web.
Imagine asking an agent to research several products, compare prices, complete a form, organize information, book an appointment, monitor a website, or perform a series of repetitive online tasks.
In that world, the browser itself becomes infrastructure.
The user does not necessarily care which browser is underneath the agent.
They care whether the agent can get the job done.
That puts OpenAI and Google back into direct competition—but on a very different battlefield.
The weapon is no longer the browser.
It is the AI agent.
Atlas was not the only casualty of the AI-browser boom.
Over roughly the same period, several other major developments reshaped the category.
Arc, developed by The Browser Company, stopped receiving active development as the company shifted its attention toward its AI-focused successor, Dia.
Sidekick was absorbed by Perplexity, with the product subsequently discontinued.
The Browser Company itself was acquired by Atlassian in a deal reportedly valued at around $610 million, turning what began as an independent browser company into part of a much larger enterprise software organization.
These outcomes are different on the surface—shutdown, acquisition, absorption and strategic repositioning—but they point toward the same underlying trend.
The independent AI browser is becoming increasingly difficult to justify as a standalone business.
The technology itself may survive.
The standalone category may not.
Atlas existed for only 292 days.
That is an extraordinarily short lifespan for a product positioned as a fundamental reinvention of the web browser.
Yet those 292 days may ultimately prove useful for OpenAI.
The company learned that its enormous ChatGPT audience does not automatically translate into willingness to change a fundamental piece of personal computing infrastructure.
It also demonstrated that users are willing to adopt AI capabilities without necessarily adopting a new browser.
That distinction could shape the next phase of AI development.
The battle for the internet’s entry point is not over.
It has simply moved above the browser.
The biggest lesson from the rise and fall of Atlas is surprisingly simple.
Users don’t necessarily want a new place to browse the web. They want their existing tools to become more capable.
For years, technology companies have competed by trying to persuade users to move from one platform to another.
AI changes that equation.
The most powerful AI products may not be the ones that force users to adopt a completely new environment. They may be the ones that quietly integrate themselves into environments users already understand.
That is why a Chrome extension can ultimately be more strategically valuable than a new browser.
And it explains the irony of Atlas’s short life.
OpenAI spent almost a year building a browser intended to replace the existing internet gateway.
In the end, its most valuable technology may live inside the gateway it was originally trying to replace.
The “Chrome killer” did not kill Chrome.
Instead, it helped demonstrate why the future of AI may not require killing the browser at all.
The next battle is not about replacing the browser. It is about making the browser intelligent enough that users no longer have to think about it.
The post OpenAI’s Atlas Shutdown Shows Why AI Doesn’t Need a New Browser appeared first on IGeeKphone China Phone, Tablet PC, VR, RC Drone News, Reviews.
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