Virgil
Ben Peters · October 2026
Every row of open tabs is an attempt to maintain a mind map
When you think about it, the web browser is the software that people probably use more than any other. It is, for the most part, their window onto the world. Yet it is a piece of software that has barely evolved as a user experience in the last thirty years.
One of the few meaningful improvements to browsers in that time was the addition of tabs, and for most people that has only meant more tabs than they can keep track of. Few people really use history or bookmarks; they have come to rely on tabs to perform this function (badly).
This classic disorder of tabs is in reality a best effort at keeping a mind map of past and active browsing — one that requires continuous manual housekeeping and nevertheless still leaves us in frustration.
Virgil plots that map for you. Every page you visit finds its place in a visual map of topics that grows as you browse. Come back a week later and you see the shape of what you were doing, the thread you were following, the things you meant to return to. Not forty near-identical tabs you cannot tell apart.
A key reason that we tolerate an inability to orientate and navigate efficiently is that we simply don’t have the time and patience to organise our own browsing beyond grouping and ordering some tabs — and why should we have to?
Fortunately, the recent developments in AI have provided a means to automatically classify and organise website visits in such a way that this burden of management can be lifted. Combining this with novel ways to visualise browsing, spatially and temporally, involves you in the process and aligns better with how we group and organise information mentally. A real mind map, rather than the crude substitute that is sorting tabs.
By reimagining the browser from the ground up, Virgil unlocks the potential for what the World Wide Web can be.
A browser that maps what you read and gives you a place to write.
The first web browser could write. Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb, built on a NeXT machine in 1990, was an editor as much as a viewer: you could open a page, change it, and make a new one without leaving the window. Reading and writing were the same act, in the same place. That half of the design did not survive — Mosaic and the browsers that followed were read-only, and within a few years publishing had become something you did somewhere else, on someone else's terms.
Web 2.0 brought us a world where software and data moved to the Web, but in the process the original ideals of the Web were significantly undermined. Although we had content that could be both read and authored by anyone, we were beholden to a tiny group of firms like Facebook and Google that dominated publishing; at liberty to censor, exploit and control.
With an Internet increasingly inundated by AI, where endless content can be written by machines that do not themselves inhabit our world, it’s ever more important that all people have a voice and a home on the Web, where anyone can freely publish information in the very same place they consume it.
In Virgil, pages you write take their place on the same map as pages you read and can then be published, fulfilling that original vision of the Web: a better way to consume and a better way to build. A shared malleable artefact.
The Web was built for humans and should be built by humans.