Aside outlines v2 roadmap, shifting focus to background automation and computer control

If you’re one of the many who moved from browsers like Dia and Comet to Aside, you should prepare for a major shift. The company’s co-founder, Chanhee, shared an early look at Aside v2 on X over the weekend, revealing plans to drop the “AI browser” label and reposition the app as a “personal work assistant” before the year wraps up.

Having recently launched on Windows, he claims the platform is “growing even faster than Arc did in its early days.”

That said, you don’t have to wait for some of the features that will be part of the v2 overhaul. Several features will be trickling down to the current version over the next couple of weeks.

Users will get synced, color-coded profiles under one account, which the team compares to Arc Spaces, along with a context feature that remembers what is on your screen so you can skip writing long prompts.

A much bigger addition is Computer Use, which lets Aside step outside the browser window to operate other apps and programs installed on your machine.

We have been tracking the browser since July, when the developers were mostly focused on keeping up with Chromium updates and making the browser lighter, so watching it jump into full desktop control is a big leap in ambition.

But there’s something even bigger than that to watch out for. When Aside v2 goes live, we will see Aside Cloud, which Chanhee says should roll out in three to four weeks.

It will let you hand off complex routines and “close your lid and keep things running” in the background, paired with a mobile app built to organize your work by topic rather than act like a traditional mobile browser.

Startups and larger teams will also get shared company memory and a developer kit later this quarter, as Chanhee noted that “I also don’t think chat is the final form of the agent experience.”

Alongside the new tools, the team promises an update in the next two weeks that cuts memory and CPU load to a third of current levels and reduces UI flickering. That sounds a bit familiar, mostly because Aside already promised a massive drop in memory and CPU usage just a couple of weeks ago.

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