I built the world’s very first Generative UI Web Browser! Every web page you visit gets repainted in real time as felt, clay, carved wood, paint, or whatever material you choose from the dropdown, live, as you surf the internet. You are not looking at a screenshot or a filter sitting on top of the page. You are actually browsing, clicking, and scrolling, except the entire web has been turned into the material of your choosing.
The concept picks up where my previous Chrome extension experiment left off. That one restyled a normal browser tab and showed the result in a side panel, which meant you always saw the real page and the AI version side by side. That was not a design choice so much as a constraint, because the AI model needs a reference image to work from, and the simplest way to give it one was to keep the real page visible right next to the output. It worked, but the reality sitting next to the illusion kept breaking the spell, and I wanted the whole experience to live entirely inside the AI generated window instead.
So I rebuilt the concept as an Electron app with the real browser running completely hidden offscreen. It loads pages and renders every frame invisibly, and humans never see it. Each of those rendered frames goes straight to the realtime AI diffusion model and comes back restyled almost instantly, driven by baked-in text prompts such as “Make this web browser image look like an oil painting, maintain div sections.” Because the reference image now lives out of sight rather than beside you, there is nothing left to remind you that you are looking at a generated version. You only ever see the painted one.
The part that makes it feel like a real browser rather than a video is the interaction. Every click, scroll, and keystroke you make in the AI generated window gets mapped straight back into the hidden real browser, and thanks to a huge pile of coordinate math it lands in exactly the right place even though the window you are looking at is a different size and shape than the page driving it. When you click the felt version of a button, you are really clicking that button, the real page responds, and the next painted frame shows you where you ended up. The result stays fully immersive and completely interactive.
What surprises me most is how fast your brain accepts it. Within a few seconds you stop thinking about the pipeline and just wander around a web made of clay and yarn and oil paint, following links and scrolling through photos as if this were a perfectly ordinary way to use the internet. It is still early and there are rough edges, but to me it hints at something bigger, which is that a web page does not have to be a fixed set of pixels. It can be a living surface you reach through and reshape on the fly, and this is my first real attempt at showing what that feels like.
