The Chrome team at Google recently built a new browser. It takes a query or prompt, opens a bunch of related tabs for you, and then builds you a custom app for whatever you’re trying to do. Ask it for travel tips and it’ll build you a planner app; ask it for study help and it’ll build you a flashcard system. It’s Googling meets vibe coding. The concept is called GenTabs, and the browser is called Disco (evidently, both for fun reasons and because it’s short for “discovery”). Google is launching both as experiments in the Search Labs today, to see if they might have a place in the future of the web.

Before we get too far: No, this is not some internal attempt to cannibalize Chrome. It started as a hackathon project inside Google, and seems to have just caught the team’s imagination. “I don’t think of Disco as a general-purpose browser,” says Parisa Tabriz, who runs the Chrome team at Google. 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, curated app that helps them do what they need, right now.”

GenTabs turns out to be an unexciting but reasonably descriptive term: They’re information-rich pages generated by Google’s Gemini AI models. One of the key features in the recently launched Gemini 3 is its ability to create one-off interactive interfaces, essentially building miniature apps on the fly instead of just returning a bunch of text or an image. GenTabs takes that idea and makes it the core feature of your web browser.

To demonstrate, Manini Roy, who runs an innovation lab on the Chrome team, opened up Disco and created a new tab. Well, again, not a tab exactly: She clicked a button in the app’s left sidebar that launched what Google is calling a “project,” which I can only describe as a browser inside the browser. The first thing that appeared was a chat box, into which Roy typed that she wanted to plan a trip to Japan. This is a bog-standard chatbot use case, and Gemini immediately got to work.

Rather than just deliver 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 planner for her. Roy accepted the offer, and after a minute or so of processing, Gemini created what appeared to be an interactive web app. It had a map of Japan with a bunch of relevant attractions marked, a relatively simple itinerary builder, and links to the sources it used. Those sources included the tabs open inside the project, and as Roy opened new tabs with other things she wanted to add to her trip, the GenTab updated with new information from those sources.

This back-and-forth, in which GenTabs suggest information but also consider the sites you open yourself, is key to the whole idea. Rather than prompt the model to keep offering you more stuff, you’re supposed to add stuff yourself! Open a bunch of tabs with the places you *know *you want to go in Japan, and the GenTab can drop them into the itinerary along with the places it suggests for you. It’s much more collaborative than the set-and-forget idea behind so many agentic systems.

Roy showed me other demos, too, including one that answered a question about how ankles work, both by opening tabs with helpful medical information and by creating a GenTab with a very unpolished but pretty helpful interactive model of the human foot. Another project was designed to help you with a cross-country move, and included moving tips, a calculator to weigh your stuff, and a price comparison table for various moving companies. In every case, the GenTab offers a bunch of tips for how you might tweak or refine the interface, plus a text box for following up however you’d like.

Disco is one of the most web-forward AI demos I’ve ever seen, in that unlike most AI browsers it appears to actually hope you open and look at websites. At first, Roy says, “we surfaced the links in the chat, but never opened the tabs. And what we found is that a lot of users kept chatting, but weren’t necessarily going into the tabs and digging into the sources.” The team wanted to incentivize users to add more information and research to the GenTab, so they needed to get them to open some regular tabs. “That is where the grounding is that the GenTabs are using to create themselves,” she says. “That’s creating the virtuous cycle.” So far, she says early data suggests pushing people to use the web instead of just the chatbot is already working.

The biggest question about GenTabs is simply: What *is *a GenTab? Is it a web app that sticks around forever and has a URL you can go to yourself and share with others? Is it something ephemeral that disappears when you close it? Tabriz says she’s not exactly sure. “We have two new primitives here, right?” she asks. “One is this concept of a project, which is a container that’s holding a chat conversation with a bunch of regular tabs with content from the open internet. And then there’s this generated tab, which has taken all this information and turned it into essentially a web app that weaved all of this together to help you get something done.”

Early users, Tabriz says, have asked for ways to share their GenTabs with others or make them permanent in other ways. When I mention that Google has many apps, like Docs and Sheets, that let users do this in fairly understandable ways, she laughs and nods. She says the answer is probably to support both permanence and ephemerality, plus to offer ways to get important data out of GenTabs and into other tools people use. (Like, for instance, all the Google Workspace apps.)

Both Roy and Tabriz seem genuinely curious and uncertain about how Disco will turn out. Will people embrace what amounts to vibe-coding one-off web apps? Will they understand the concept of a back-and-forth between web tabs and GenTabs? Do GenTabs ultimately make more sense as their own app — a sort of project management tool — or as a feature of Chrome or Search or Docs or something else? They don’t know. Hence the experiment. But more than just about any AI browser I’ve seen, Disco feels like it is both AI and web browser. And if it can put those two things together to make something even better, well, maybe it *can *take on Chrome.

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• David Pierce