Chrome / Firefox / Edge and others will have their own AI implementation sooner or later. OpenAI's choice is whether they want to be a second class citizen competing with a native AI integration, or start their own country where they are the ones setting the rules.
For-profit customizations (via an extension) may want to fork to avoid competitive situations such as e.g. the multi-year struggle between uBlock Origin extension and Google:
Not for-profit may fare better, tolerating and pivoting as corporate owners attempt to strategically vendor-lock-in new markets, presented to e.g. Google by the innovators of the extension.
Putting your brand name on the primary application users interact with on a computer is probably a few billion times more valuable than an extension in a thing under someone else's brand.
Are these extension-fodder:
- "new tab" shows custom UI with LLM prompt
- Reads contents of user's web page in Chat UI, shown alongside web page
- new UI gizmo at Text-selection, showing ChatGPT flower icon, with context features available for selected text
- maintains "agent personality / context" (IDK the term) across tabs