In case you missed Day 1 of Wave 10, click here.

The big launch today is the Windsurf Browser, increasing the surfaces in which Windsurf natively plugs into for maximum implicit context understanding and flow awareness.

Let’s get into it….

The Windsurf Browser

The Windsurf Browser is a fully functional AI-integrated browser that maximizes keeping you in flow state while working.

Let’s see the Browser in action:

The Windsurf Browser can be launched by clicking the button on the top right of the Windsurf surface:

In the Windsurf Browser, you can debug apps or search the web, view webpages, documentation, Github issues, and more, just as you would with any other browser.

Let’s say you wanted to do something with the contents of your currently open browser tab of reference documentation. For most applications, you would have to copy the contents from the tab. For applications with web search and html parsing abilities, you would need to copy in the URL. With the Windsurf Browser, you just have to specify what you want to do because Cascade is already aware of the tabs you have open in the Browser, or you can explicitly add in a page as context without needing to copy-paste:

The Tactical

At the end of the day, the Windsurf Browser is just another browser, a Chromium fork. So, you can use it normally as a browser! When used in conjunction with the Windsurf Editor, you get all of these magical moments.

We are releasing the Windsurf Browser in beta, available to all self-serve plans to start. We look forward to iterating on it with feedback from the community.

Background to the Browser

The need for the Windsurf Browser comes back to the concept of flow awareness highlighted in Wave 9 with SWE-1. The quick summary is that it is important for both the human and the AI to operate on the same shared timeline of actions, with both aware of the others’ actions so that the human and AI truly operate in lock step. Then, as the AI gets better with time, more of those actions on the timeline get switched from the human having to do it to the AI able to do it, but the steps in the timeline remain constant. For this to work, however, we need to first be able to capture the entire depth and breadth of actions that a developer could take while performing their work, across all surfaces. We already have Windsurf hooked up to the text editor, the terminal, and more, making sure there are no gaps in the shared timeline for actions taken in these surfaces.

However, a big gap that remained was work that the developer did in the browser - looking up documentation, iterating on frontend, checking CI, and more. Imagine you were the AI in an IDE trying to help a developer do work, and you have no visibility on what they’re doing in the browser - looking at webpages, peering through console logs, selecting components or content, and more. All you had was visibility of what happened in the IDE. No matter how good you are at understanding the context of the information and surfaces in the IDE, there is a theoretical limit to how useful you would be because you are simply missing information.

Back in Wave 4, we introduced Previews, which was our first pass of this flow awareness of the browser. Cascade had some understanding of the kinds of frontend components or errors that the user was interacting with and was interested in. But developers were still restricted to just clicking components or sending console error logs for their local development. Instead, the Browser becomes a shared space where Cascade can pull logs, read page content, and access the DOM if and when it wants, whether for local development or third party websites. Not all of these interactions are automatic today, but will eventually be.

And the beauty of having the Browser, and consequently a much more complete measurement of the true timeline of actions, is that all of our systems that ingest the shared timeline automatically get better. For example, SWE-1 is a model trained to reason over a data representation that mimics the shared timeline. As part of this wave, we have already finetuned and optimized SWE-1 to work well with the Windsurf Browser, making it the most browser-action-aware model in the market.

What’s Next

There’s two halves of what comes next with the Browser: browser awareness and browser use. For browser awareness, we can make our systems even better at ingesting the information and context we have about how a developer interacts with a browser surface. That’s the straightforward half.

Browser use is also a corollary of the shared timeline, since now we have the foundation for the AI to start taking over actions that the developer currently does in the browser. In other words, enabling Cascade to use the browser itself. But not just any old browser use, browser use that is conditional on all of the actions (not just mouse clicks) that have happened in the past across all surfaces (not just the browser, but also the IDE, terminal, etc). In Wave 9, we told you we had a flywheel to constantly make the product better. The Windsurf Browser is simply just the next step in the journey.

We will wrap up Wave 10 tomorrow with a series of other features and improvements.