Google Disco is a new experimental browser based on artificial intelligence “GenTabs”

The Chrome team at Google recently created a new browser. It takes a query or prompt, opens you up to a bunch of related tabs, and then builds you a custom app for whatever you’re trying to do. Ask him for travel tips and he will create a planner app for you; Ask him for help with studying and he will build you a flashcard system. It’s Google search meets bioprogramming. The concept is called GenTabs, and the browser is called Disco (obviously for fun reasons and because it’s short for “discovery”). Google is launching both tests in its research labs today to see if they have a place in the future of the web.

Before we go any further: No, this is not an internal attempt to do this Disassemble Chrome. It started as a hackathon project within Google, and it seems like it has just captured the team’s imagination. “I don’t think Disco is a general-purpose browser,” says Parisa Tabriz, who runs Google’s Chrome team. It can certainly open and interact with websites, but its real job is to see what happens when “people go from just having tabs to creating this very personalized, organized app that helps them do what they need to do in the moment.”

Turns out, GenTabs are an unsexy but reasonably descriptive term: they’re information-rich pages generated by Google’s Gemini AI models. One of the main features of Gemini 3 was recently launched Its ability to create interactive, one-off interfaces is essentially to create mini-applications on the fly rather than just returning a bunch of text or images. GenTabs takes this idea and makes it the core feature of your web browser.

To illustrate, Manini Roy, who runs an innovation lab on the Chrome team, opened Disco and created a new tab. Well, again, not exactly a tab: I clicked a button in the app’s left sidebar, launching what Google calls a “project,” which I can only describe as a browser within a browser. The first thing that appeared was a chat box, in which Roy wrote that she wanted to plan a trip to Japan. This is a use case for standard chatbots, and Gemini started working immediately.

Instead of just handing over a bunch of text and links, Disco immediately did two things: It opened a bunch of tabs related to Roy’s query and offered to create an interactive chart for it. Roy accepted the offer, and after a minute or so of processing, Gemini created what appeared to be an interactive web application. It contained a map of Japan with a collection of related sights, a relatively simple itinerary builder, and links to the sources he used. These sources included open tabs within the project, and as Roy opened new tabs with other things she wanted to add to her journey, the GenTab was updated with new information from those sources.

This exchange, in which GenTabs suggests information, but also takes into account sites you open yourself, is central to the whole idea. Instead of asking the model to keep giving you more stuff, you’re supposed to add stuff yourself! Open a group of tabs in the places you want He knows You want to go to Japan, and GenTab can include it in your itinerary as well as the places it suggests for you. It’s more collaborative than the “set and forget” idea behind many proxy systems.

Roy showed me other demos as well, including one that answered the question of how ankles work, by opening tabs containing useful medical information and creating a GenTab with a not-so-polished but very useful interactive model of the human foot. Another project designed to help you move across the country, includes moving tips, a calculator for the weight of your items, and a price comparison table for different moving companies. In each case, GenTab provides a set of tips on how to modify or improve the interface, as well as a text box to follow along however you like.

Disco is one of the most web-driven AI demos I’ve ever seen Unlike most AI browsers It sounds like you’re actually hoping to open the websites and take a look at them. At first, “we showed the links in chat, but we never opened the tabs,” says Roy. “And what we found was that a lot of users were continuing to chat, but they weren’t necessarily going into tabs and looking at resources.” The team wanted to incentivize users to add more information and research to GenTab, so they needed to get them to open some regular tabs. “This is basically what GenTabs uses to create themselves,” she says. “This creates a virtuous cycle.” So far, she says, the early data suggests people are getting pushed to use the web rather than just a chatbot that’s already running.

The biggest question about GenTabs is simply: what He is gintap? Is it a web application that stays around forever and has a URL that you can go to and share with others? Is it something ephemeral that disappears when you close it? Tabriz says she’s not entirely sure. “We have two new primitives here, right?” she asks. “One is the project concept, which is a container containing a chat conversation with a bunch of regular tabs with content from the open internet. Then there’s the created tab, which has taken all of this information and turned it into a web application that weaves all of this together to help you get something done.”

Tabriz says early adopters asked for ways to share their GenTabs with others or make them permanent in other ways. When I mentioned that Google has many applications, such as Docs and Sheets, that allow users to do this in fairly understandable ways, she laughed and nodded. The answer, she says, may be to support both permanence and ephemerality, as well as offering ways to take important data from GenTabs and feed it into other tools people use. (Like, for example, all Google Workspace apps.)

Both Roy and Tabrez seem genuinely curious and unsure of how disco will turn out. Will people adopt what amounts to one-off web applications? Will they understand the concept of navigating back and forth between web tabs and GenTabs? Does GenTabs ultimately make more sense as its own app — a kind of project management tool — or as a feature for Chrome, Search, Docs, or something else? They don’t know. Hence the experience. But more than just any AI browser I’ve seen, Disco feels like both an AI browser and a web browser. And if those two things can be combined to make something better, well, maybe it is He can Take on Chrome.