Comment by hackyhacky
Comment by hackyhacky 4 days ago
Serious question, not snark: Does anyone actually want this? I honestly can't imagine a use for these features even among people tech savvy enough to understand them.
Comment by hackyhacky 4 days ago
Serious question, not snark: Does anyone actually want this? I honestly can't imagine a use for these features even among people tech savvy enough to understand them.
I use AI-controlled browsers for everyday tasks like “Find me a Michelin starred restaurant in Paris with availability for 4 people at 8PM today”.
Also for things like locating a product available to pick up in a nearby store, it’s crazy how often Google fails at this particular task.
I mean, if you don't care at all about cuisine, style, location etc. I guess? Searching is half the fun of something like that.
Anyways I will (continue to) not touch Chrome with a 1000ft pole after this. AI is awful in almost every aspect I've ever tasked it to.
It’ll give me a list of what’s available, the searching process isn’t made any more fun by including restaurants which will be a pain in the ass to book for a given date.
Having a browser that works for me would be useful yeah. Stuff like skip the story and give me the recipe, or click through the pointless extra steps, or reformat my address into the bizarre format the website wants.
Of course the single biggest thing my browser can do to help me is blocking ads, which means it's curious to see this just after Google killed adblock in chrome.
Adblock continues to be just as effective as it ever was in Chrome.
Even before the removal of MV2, the claims that it would kill adblock were ridiculous as many adblockers had already switched to MV3 but it was at least understandable that people could be ignorant of that fact. Now that everything is on MV3 how can people still be claiming that Google killed adblock when Chrome users still have working adblockers?
I've seen at least one decent use case from "normies" around me: Bypassing stupid company processes to achieve actual automated productivity in your rote processes instead of the theatre of it.
Sounds like a contrived situation, but there's a surprising amount of "thought leader" CEOs out there who make completely nonsensical decisions under the banner of "saving costs and automating things".
(Real-world example I know of) company pays for cheapest tier they can find of Gemini, tell everyone to use it. But won't pay for Asana seats, so every user in your 100-person startup is a guest, and can't use the connector in any AI app to TRULY do useful task management with AI.
Having some better access to AI in the browser would pave over that pain for someone who currently doesn't want to spend their own money on something like Claude for Cowork and the Chrome extension to drive the browser, or open a terminal to have Claude Code do it.
I like having AI in my browser, I use Claude quite a bit.
Examples: using my budgeting app directly to figure out why some forecasting event went wrong, or helping me correlate SOC2 tickets with GitHub pull requests and flagging all that are older than $date.
It’s surprisingly convenient for a narrow set of tasks.
In one of the previous companies i worked at, we were automating a very valid use case of a bunch of people crawling though a set of urls daily/weekly and find the pdfs and summarise the changes from the previous week. I'm guessing these features are geared towards them.
I use claude's chrome plugin all the time. As well Chatgpt's agent mode. I prefer Agent mode when I don't need to login but want it to do search.
However, Gemini in Chrome requires you to allow them to use your data to improve their model, which I won't consent to. Google workspace account seems exempt so I plan to try it out there.
Me personally: absolutely not - and I fundamentally do not understand the need for something like this. I would never use such a tool under any possible circumstance knowing what I know about the current technology underpinning these clankers.
These feels on par with Microsoft's push to shove Copilot down everyone's neck at every step possible whether we like/need it or not
I like doing side projects, I don't like wasting a day of work potential on any of these web apps: Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Appstore Connect, Google's Android App Store, RevenueCat, Stripe, etc
I dread having to log in to these systems and waste hours achieving the simplest tasks.
This is what I'm using Claude for. E.g. I log in to AppStore connect, tell it what I need (3 subscription tiers), it will do all the clicking and editing and Apple's stupid UI, then I will ask it to create a summary for RevenueCat, and use another Claude session in there to click all the buttons to configure based on what just happened in Appstore connect.
Or configuring S3 buckets or whatnot.