The artificial intelligence (AI) browser wars, which have periodically simmered in the past few months, now witness the arrival of the most serious player yet. Google is bringing Gemini in Chrome to India, alongside Canada and New Zealand, marking a serious AI layer in the world’s most commonly used web browser. The web browser, which didn’t really evolve or change user habits for the best part of two decades, is undergoing a significant overhaul.
“We are launching it to India, New Zealand, and Canada, and also expanding our language support to over 50 languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil,” says Charmaine D’Silva, who is Director, Product Management, Chrome, in a briefing of which HT was a part. “Gemini in Chrome is what we call our AI browsing assistant,” she added.
Google’s pitch is simple: to make Gemini available to users within apps where it additionally has localised relevance. In Chrome, Gemini’s relevance will span page summaries, searching and explaining information found on a web page, comparing options (particularly relevant for shortlists and shopping), and working across Google apps for more context as a full-fledged chatbot for the world’s queries. The key design integration is a sidebar within the window.
This was first released in the US late last year, and India is the second wave of broader availability. “India is such an important market for Chrome,” says D’Silva.
HT notes that for image generations and edits, Google’s Nano Banana model is available, while prompts for summarisation provide a choice between Gemini 3’s Fast, Thinking, and Pro models. Users can choose to leave this in ‘auto’ mode, allowing Gemini to automatically select the best model for a query.
For Google, the Gemini in Chrome proposition aims to build with three key elements — productivity, helpfulness, and safety. Google wants Gemini within the Chrome browser to become an assistant that helps users understand pages, compare information across tabs, summarise content, and complete tasks faster. Google says it is embedding AI into familiar Chrome experiences, including search-related workflows, so users get assistance inside tools they already use.
Google says it is also using AI defensively inside Chrome, including for scam detection and safer browsing, and battling the threat of prompt injection in AI-focused browsers.
The Gemini AI assistant can contextualise information from the current tab and up to 10 other open tabs to summarise articles, compare products across different websites, or answer specific questions about the content. Gemini Live is also part of Gemini in Chrome, for conversational AI while browsing.
The wider rollout of Gemini in Chrome must worry OpenAI, which makes the ChatGPT Atlas browser, Perplexity, which has the Comet browser, and Microsoft, which has the Copilot Mode in Edge. Google Chrome dominates the global browser market with approximately 69.89% share across all platforms as of February, according to research firm Statcounter. Safari (16.39%), Edge (5.46%), and Firefox (2.29%) follow.
Gemini for Chrome is available for MacOS, Windows, and Chromebook Plus platforms.
Gemini’s context advantage, particularly for users already within the Google ecosystem, holds value compared with bolting on tools from OpenAI and Perplexity or completely switching to a different web browser. Google expects Chrome with Gemini enabled to act as the glue between its different services, including Gmail, Calendar, and YouTube.
Google, at this time, is not launching the Auto Browser agentic AI feature in India.
