The Chrome team at Google recently created a recent browser. It takes a query or prompt, opens a few related tabs, and then creates a custom app for whatever you’re trying to do. Ask him for travel tips and he’ll create a planning app for you; ask him for lend a hand with your studies and he will create a flashcard system for you. It’s Googling and vibration coding. The concept is called GenTabs and the browser is called Disco (apparently both for fun and because it’s brief for “discovery”). Google is launching both solutions today as part of experiments in Google Labs to see if they could have applications in the future of the internet.
Before we go too far: no, this is not an internal attempt to cannibalize Chrome. It started as a hackathon project at Google and it seems to have just captured the team’s imagination. “I don’t consider Disco a general-purpose browser,” says Parisa Tabriz, who leads the Chrome team at Google. He can certainly open and interact with websites, but his real job is to see what happens when “people go from having bookmarks to creating this very personalized, curated app that helps them do what they need, right now.”
GenTabs turns out to be an unexciting but quite descriptive term: these are information-rich pages generated by Google’s Gemini AI models. One of the key features of the recently introduced Gemini 3 is the ability to create one-off interactive interfaces, essentially building miniature applications on the fly rather than simply returning a text or image file. GenTabs takes this idea and makes it a core feature of your web browser.
To demonstrate this, Manini Roy, who runs the innovation lab on the Chrome team, opened Disco and created a recent tab. Well, again, it’s not exactly a tab: She clicked a button in the app’s left sidebar, which launched 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 where Roy wrote that she wanted to plan a trip to Japan. This is a typical exploit case for a chatbot and Gemini immediately got to work.
Instead of just providing a bunch of text and links, Disco immediately did two things: it opened several tabs related to Roy’s query and offered to create an interactive planner for her. Roy accepted the offer, and after about a minute of processing, Gemini created what appeared to be an interactive web application. It included a map of Japan with relevant attractions marked, a relatively uncomplicated itinerary, and links to the sources she used. These sources included tabs open in the project, and as Roy opened recent tabs with other things she wanted to add to her journey, GenTab updated with recent information from these sources.
This exchange of information, where GenTabs suggests information but also takes into account the pages you open yourself, is the key to the whole idea. Instead of trying to convince the model to keep giving you more things, you should add them yourself! Open several tabs with the places you visit know you want to go to Japan, and GenTab can put it on your itinerary along with the places it suggests for you. It is much more collaborative than the “set it and forget it” concept behind many agent systems.
Roy also showed me other demos, including one that answered a question about how ankles work, both opening tabs with useful medical information and creating a GenTab with a very crude but quite helpful interactive model of the human foot. Another project was designed to lend a hand you move abroad and included moving tips, a calculator for weighing your belongings, and a price comparison chart for different moving companies. In each case, GenTab offers some tips for improving or refining the interface, as well as a text box where you can take further action.
Disco is one of the most online demonstrations of AI I’ve ever seen, because unlike most browsers, the AI appears to actually open and browse web pages. Early on, says Roy, “we detected links in the chat, but never opened the tabs. We found that many users were still chatting, but weren’t necessarily going to the tabs and viewing the feeds.” The team wanted to encourage users to add more information and research to GenTab, so they had to get them to open some regular tabs. “This is where the foundations that GenTabs use to create themselves lie,” he says. “It’s creating a virtuous cycle.” So far, she says, preliminary data suggests that encouraging people to go online instead of using a chatbot is already working.
The gigantic question about GenTabs is simply: What Is GenTab? Is it a web application that stays forever and has a URL that you can go to and share with others? Is it something ephemeral that disappears when closed? Tabriz says she’s not entirely sure. “We have two new primitives here, right?” – he asks. “One of them is the idea of a project, which is a container where you have a chat conversation with some regular tabs with content from the open internet. Then you generate a tab that took all that information and turned it into essentially a web application that wove it all together to help you do something.”
Tabriz says early users have asked about ways to share their GenTabs with others or otherwise persist them. When I mention that Google has many apps like Docs and Sheets that allow users to do this in a fairly self-explanatory way, he laughs and nods. He says the answer will likely be to support both persistence and ephemerality, as well as offer ways to get essential data from GenTab into other tools people exploit. (Like all Google Workspace apps, for example).
Both Roy and Tabriz seem really curious and unsure how Disco will end. Will people adopt something that means encoding the vibrations of disposable web applications? Will they understand the concept of switching between web tabs and GenTabs? Does GenTabs ultimately make more sense as a standalone app – a project management tool of sorts – or as a feature of Chrome, Search, Docs, or something else? They don’t know. Hence the experiment. But more than any other AI browser I’ve seen, Disco feels as much an AI as it does a web browser. And if you can combine the two to create something even better, well, maybe so Power challenge Chrome.