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Claude for Chrome

(www.anthropic.com)
795 points davidbarker | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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parsabg ◴[] No.45031888[source]
I built a very similar extension [1] a couple of months ago that supports a wide range of models, including Claude, and enables them to take control of a user's browser using tools for mouse and keyboard actions, observation, etc. It's a fun little project to look at to understand how this type of thing works.

It's clear to me that the tech just isn't there yet. The information density of a web page with standard representations (DOM, screenshot, etc) is an order of magnitude lower than that of, say, a document or piece of code, which is where LLMs shine. So we either need much better web page representations, or much more capable models, for this to work robustly. Having LLMs book flights by interacting with the DOM is sort of like having them code a web app using assembly. Dia, Comet, Browser Use, Gemini, etc are all attacking this and have big incentives to crack it, so we should expect decent progress here.

A funny observation was that some models have been clearly fine tuned for web browsing tasks, as they have memorized specific selectors (e.g. "the selector for the search input in google search is `.gLFyf`").

[1] https://github.com/parsaghaffari/browserbee

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miguelspizza ◴[] No.45032983[source]
> It's clear to me that the tech just isn't there yet.

Totally agree. This was the thesis behind MCP-B (now WebMCP https://github.com/MiguelsPizza/WebMCP)

HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515403

DOM and visual parsing are dead ends for browser automation. Not saying models are bad; they are great. The web is just not designed for them at all. It's designed for humans, and humans, dare I say, are pretty impressive creatures.

Providing an API contract between extensions and websites via MCP allows an AI to interact with a website as a first-class citizen. It just requires buy-in from website owners.

It's being proposed as a web standard: > https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webmcp

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chatmasta ◴[] No.45033221[source]
I suspect this kind of framework will be adopted by websites with income streams that are not dependent on human attention (i.e. advertising revenue, mostly). They have no reason to resist LLM browser agents. But if they’re in the business of selling ads to human eyeballs, expect resistance.

Maybe the AI companies will find a way to resell the user’s attention to the website, e.g. “you let us browse your site with an LLM, and we’ll show your ad to the user.”

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1. miguelspizza ◴[] No.45033539[source]
The Primary client for WebMCP enabled websites is a chrome extension like Claude Chrome. So the human is still there in the loop looking at the screen. MCP also supports things like elicitation so the website could stop the model and request human input/attention