So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.
No, it can only access the tab you are currently on. And that too just the content that is already available. It can't scroll up and down to load more. It can't follow links. It can't run any actions. You'll get a ton more functionality by just taking a screenshot of the page yourself and pasting it in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.
I'm sure that kind of functionality is coming. There's a lot of activity in the chromium repo (chrome/browser/actor/tools) that appears to be adding support for that sort of orchestration.
But whats the vision of this? Where are they trying to take the customer?
I feel like this issue relates back to the origin of Google (search) in the first place. It was borne out of a technology in which the founders did not envision what it would become. It seems the firm just tries ideas and then tries to figure out where it goes - thats the culture. And unsurprisingly, yields a lot of failiures.
In contrast, Apples approach yields a much higher rate of success with less risk.
I feel the same about Firefox's vision, although I admit I haven't tried it. Often when I visit a place like chat.mistral.ai Firefox gives a weird popup that says something about "don't you wish you didn't have to open this in a tab?" Like is that their AI vision? Saving me a tab?
No no no we don't need a sustainable answer to the cancer of ads on the internet, that would break capitalism and send the world sliding into chaos! No, see, what we need is AI in our browsers. That is going to transform things.
The idea is you could ask a to browser to do things like operate on multiple websites to do boring stuff, e.g. cross check phone reviews across sites x y and z.
I 100% don't feel comfortable letting my browser work alone, but "agentic browsers" are a thing some people want and/or are building.
A small part of me wants this to spectacularly succeed so I can stop using whatever the army of figma designers wishes to force down my throat when most things I need could be spreadsheets with a few buttons with macros hooked up.
It makes sense as an avenue for Agents as well, since it is the defacto "work app" platform. For many, their entire workday is spent inside the browser.
> So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.
Well, they're gonna have to support an astronomical scale of queries - not many companies in the world are able to do it and Alphabet is doing it pretty much on their own stack of cloud, a.i chips and software. So sure, the front end is not a big deal but this is still a big move.
They took 1 step at a time instead of trying to take multiple steps at a time, how is that a bad thing. They're obviously getting things prep'd for Chrome agents and Gemini 3.
