The Problem with Most Enterprise Browsers

A real category of enterprise browsers has emerged over the past few years: Island, Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Browser, and others built to lock down where sensitive company data can go and to protect against escalating cyber threats. They deserve credit for taking browser security seriously in a way Chrome and Edge hadn't previously. But look past the security layer and you find the same tabs, the same toggling, the same interface web browsers have shipped for twenty years. They took an old interface and made it more compliant. They didn't ask whether the interface itself was a problem.

It was. The toggle tax is not a new complaint. Researchers have measured it and the number that stuck with me is from a Harvard Business Review study: nearly 1,200 app and website switches a day for the average user, costing close to four hours a week just reorienting after each one.

Two things have made this even harder to ignore today. The first is the number of tools. The average employee now interacts with 40 different applications, according to observed usage data from Torii, and in a Freshworks survey, workers said they lose nearly seven hours a week, almost a full workday, to fragmented tools and complicated processes. The second is AI. Enterprises are racing to put it in employees' hands, and in Gartner's 2026 survey of more than 12,000 workers, 88 percent of those given an approved AI tool were also using a personal one for work. That is the toggle tax and the security problem showing up in the same interface. A browser built only to lock things down can block those personal tools, but it can't make the sanctioned one useful enough that people stop reaching for the others.

We've seen this pattern before with workplace software, and Slack is the clearest example. When it set out to replace email and reinvent workplace chat, it had to be secure: enterprise-grade security, audit trails, admin controls, everything a regulated company's compliance team would demand. But nobody has ever pitched Slack to me as a security product. Nobody says "we switched to Slack because it's safer." They say they like Slack because it replaced email threads with channels, because it plugs into every tool a team already uses, because it changed what a chat app was supposed to do for a team's workflow. Security was the price of entry. Collaboration and productivity were the reason people chose it.

That's the split the new enterprise browsers haven't made yet. When they do talk about productivity, they usually mean less friction from security itself: their browser is faster and less painful than routing everyone through a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) session. That's an important improvement, but it removes a penalty rather than adding a gain.

We learned what enterprises need from a browser by building HERE alongside some of the largest banks in the world. Every one of them put us through a rigorous security review before we got anywhere near production, and we expected that. These are institutions that spend enormous sums on security, and much of it was in place long before we arrived: hardened networks, managed devices, monitored endpoints, tightly governed identity.

But security was table stakes for these teams, not the reason they came to us. They came to us because their traders, their wealth advisors, and their call center agents were buried in tabs and disjointed apps, and because every second lost clicking between systems showed up somewhere that mattered: a slower trade, a longer hold time, a client repeating information they'd already given twice. The requirements that filled our roadmap were "let someone see the account, the trade blotter, and the case file side by side instead of clicking through five tabs to find it." They were "let this system talk to that one so nobody retypes the same client ID for the fifth time today." They were "let someone search across every tool they have access to from one place," and "stop burying the one alert that matters under forty that don't." Layout, interoperability, search, notifications. None of that is a security feature. All of it is why the browser we built looks nothing like the ones being sold as "enterprise browsers" today.

This is also where AI comes back in, because the safe way to deploy it and the productive way turn out to be the same. An AI assistant bolted onto a separate tab doesn't know what you're doing, so it can't help you do it. Enterprises need a browser where AI already knows the account you're looking at, the case you're working, the context you're in, because it's built into the workspace and stays inside the controls the company already has.

That's the piece missing from the current conversation about enterprise browsers. Many IT leaders are focused on how to make browsing more secure. That is more important than ever in the AI era, but it's the wrong finish line. The equally important question is whether the browser makes an employee faster and gives them AI that understands their work, with security as the foundation. A browser that only answers the security question is solving half the assignment. The other half is the one that decides whether the employee gets more done, and whether they're happier doing it.