Another showcase of Google using their dominant market position for Chrome to gain advantage in other markets, like AI agents.

So they integrate Gemini to summarize open web pages and consolidate all your open tabs into summaries. (Open lot's of pages, then summarize them all.) You can search your history with natural language and type Gemini queries directly into the address bar.

This will give them a cognitive profile of you: reading comprehension, decision-making patterns, knowledge gaps, etc.

Scary.

This sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's Recall, only implemented in the browser.

Granted, there have been a lot of times I have trouble finding a website in my history, open tabs or even bookmarks, so I could potentially see how that might be advantageous as long as I was in a situation where I had a second browser for "non-work" related tasks, or this was strictly prohibited in in-private mode.

>4. Find webpages you previously visited

>For those frustrating instances when you want to jump back into a past project but don’t want to scroll through your history to find an important website you previously visited, soon you’ll be able to use Gemini in Chrome to recall it for you. Once launched, you can try prompts like “what was the website that I saw the walnut desk on last week?” or “what was that blog I read on back to school shopping?”

As for their "agentic browsing assistant", I don't have much trouble adding stuff to my shopping cart or other minor tasks. I'm still waiting on that 'Google Duplex' [1] feature they announced years ago that claimed Google would make phone calls for me to make appointments and etc. Make a doctor's appointment? Dispute a charge on my bill? That's what I want.

[1] https://youtu.be/D5VN56jQMWM

Sometimes I wish companies would stop forcing AI features down our throats and putting them just everywhere. At least I hope I can properly disable all of this. I don't need an AI agent scanning everything behind my back.

Very interested to see how well the agentic features work compared to ChatGPT’s cloud version. At the very least, I imagine bot detection/prevention (I.e., CAPTCHA) will be less of issue with Google’s strategy since the browser’s fingerprint will differ Chrome user to Chrome user.

Funny how this announcement comes days after Google learned that it didn't need to sell Chrome

Some of these features would be nice to have, but I'm not sure I even want my browser to have these capabilities unless there is a mechanism to keep it all local. This is a monumental change to the amount of user data Google can collect via Chrome.

Not a comment re: AI in Chrome. I did click into the video to hopefully get an understanding of the features,. but sadly did not. Sorta got an idea, but the jump cuts, super-quick overviews, trying to identify everyone speaking, etc. E.g. ...something about tabs... ...used to take 20 minutes, now seconds... ...working with OTHER Google products (WTH)... Hey Google, make a simpler, more accessible video that is "just the facts mam". Dozens of jump cuts in a few minutes is disconcerting, and may prove dangerous to some.

This will surely bring the users back after killing adblockers /s

More AI spyware running on user devices?

Seems reasonable TBH.

I don't know the future of browsers given the trends in AI, but it seems fine to add an opt in ability to browsers to allow an LLM to access the current (or a set) of tabs. If it works it would reduce the amount of copy-paste, which seems like a good thing.

It's hardly a killer feature. I'm still going to use chatgpt (and gemini) a tremendous amount.

When the webpage AI argues with the browser AI, which argues with the OS AI which argues with the on-chip mainboard, CPU and GPU AIs, while the monitor AIs frantically try to make notes and the smarthome AI watches all of it and can only shake its metaphorical head.

Oh, look a wild Microsoft Recall appears, sure I want the AI to know my browser history and what I do on the web

Are you kidding me!? We are living in the future and the first thing we (have to) worry about is that something will be used against us.

I really want the 2008 Google where everything they made was welcomed and not hated on sight.

Agentic browser? This. is. what. I. want.

Asking the browser about "that specific thing I might have seen last week?" Sign me the f up!

I'm not being sarcastic, I really wish I could have all of this and not having to worry about antagonistic companies and governments.

How does one disable this feature?

A lot of these new AI features can be helpful as long as the users' control the data. Is there an alternate world where Google might become the good guy here? In this world, as might be expected, the company making the worlds best spyware, wants to expand its spying.

>Combat more sophisticated scams with Gemini Nano

Fantastic, Googles AI will be fighting to stop the scams Googles advertising promotes to me...

That agentic stuff is going to be a big deal. Probably the most interesting part of LLMs besides coding. Assuming it works well

I don't want any of this crap. We need to push for the right to opt out of AI features. All of this garbage should be opt in.

They're all wearing shades of green.

It is astonishing that the word “privacy” appears zero times in this announcement. There have been repeated controversies over exactly how Google sees just the URL I visit. Now they want to see the entire contents of multiple browser tabs?

Does anyone know if Chromium is spared of these features?

Can I block it as a site host? (Please don't respond about how I shouldn't want to and isn't it just like some other usecase that I'd obviously want not to block)