Yes. AI is the next abstraction layer. By analogy, instead of wielding the wrench (application) yourself, you have a plumber (AI) fix your pipes. The browser is just a rich interface to that AI.

I think Google PMs would respond by saying that nobody in 2007 was like "Man, if only I could get rid of the physical keyboard on my smartphone".

You know, the whole "faster horse" argument.

Honestly? Yeah. Not really Gemini or AI chat bot stuff, but I definitely appreciate when the software I use that interacts with images includes at least some minor drawing/highlighting/text overlay capabilities. So, while I don't like this feature in particular, I'm not against the general idea.

Yes, Google's shareholders.

Still better than Microsoft though, Android is still not a Windows 11 kind of AI everywhere without roadmap mess.

“Head to head” doing a lot of heavy lifting. How much market share does Atlas have I wonder.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

If it skips ads many people would want it. But it's made by Google so I suspect it's goal is to skip non-Google ads only.

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

Right now I paste screenshots of AWS/Azure/GCP into Claude and ask it questions on how to navigate around / what to do / how to set things up. This seems like a much better experience solely to not have to deal with the weird mac screenshot UX.

Google shareholders want it. If search collapses they need a new stupidly profitable golden goose else Google has a giant hole in their finances

It’s already available behind a flag IIRC.

Looks like they may be using it to write their tweets?

Maybe I’m a curmudgeon who can’t imagine throwing an elaborate Y2K party because all my friends were alive and threw parties at the real Y2K, but… these all feel extremely contrived.

It’s as if they used AI to generate use cases for their AI tool because they weren’t really sure what it’s for…

This is satire, right?

funny you say that, I was literally just booking a flight with air china yesterday and the UX was 10x better than the average wizzair/ryanair experience - a clear, readable UI (with a great table comparison of prices +-3 days from the selected dates), no ads, no random services getting pushed in your face, no booking tabs automatically opening in the background

If you struggle, then an agent will probably fail.