Look, Another AI Browser

To be sure, a browser that retains a representation of every word you read on it, constantly synthesizing a profile on your preferences, using that profile to filter everything you see through a lens that consistently enforces and limits the worldview of a snapshot-of-you - all with a level of data retention that would be controversial for Google but that OpenAI's users will happily opt into, that Palantir and its government clients are likely salivating over, and that is fertile ground for a new generation of ads that bypass pesky things like third-party cookie restrictions - must be exciting to many!

It's just not exciting to me.

Another possible aspect of it is that probably more and more sites are blocking AI crawlers through e.g. Cloudflare's support for blocking AI crawler and AI agents. This will give them a backdoor to that content through a user's connection.

I am not sure if this is happening, but as blocking becomes more prevalent, having a widely-used browser will help.

Why won't these sites simply block this browser?

Man, I miss the old days, seeing new tech come out and not immediately wondering how the worst parts of our industry are going to turn it into the torment nexus.

Because this browser is just chromium and its user agent will be indistinguishable

It can (and likely will) just transmit standard browser signals. The AI integration is more of a UI layer on top, not something that is being sent in a request header UA string.

That lack of signals in addition to the regular human behavior patterns that something like Puppeteer doesn't have is going to make this practically impossible to block

I can just see the news story now:

"Oops, we got caught using our customers' internet connections as exit nodes for the largest residential proxy ever to exist, both on pages they visited and ones that they didn't. But don't worry, this was an unauthorized experimental rollout to only parts of the world that we don't have legal nexus in. The program has been halted, and the person responsible has been sacked. Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti..."

If such a browser was unavoidable I'd just drop off the web and read books. They can only turn the screws so much.

I remember the optimism:

Google is launched and it is web directories but…better. It takes a decade to become a monolithic ad-tech company but all is not lost yet, until it becomes the face of enshittification of the entire internet another decade on.

Facebook is launched and it’s this cool way to keep in touch with your friends until that too becomes a monolithic ad-tech company a decade later, and soon after becomes the face of enshittification of social media as a whole, lowering the bar on civility to a subterranean level.

Ditto for Amazon and the enshittification of online retail. And Microsoft with.. whatever the hell you call Windows these days.

What took 10, 20, even 30 years to show up as being bad for society now takes just a couple of years, maybe even less than that. Maybe even straight away.

It’s like the stagnation of Asimov’s Galactic Empire. A bunch of crusty old tech companies, too big to change.

I hear Ray Bradbury is a pretty good novelist.

I downloaded it to see if Anubis can block it. It lies and claims to be Google Chrome.

So much modern tech is just about capture and extraction, not actually empowering the end user. It's as if guitar companies found a way to make more money in claiming royalties on musicians' work instead of building good guitars.

Bots can report such user agents too, so that's not the reason.

The reason is that it's easier to block bot hosting providers. That's why illegal botnets rely on compromised personal machines.

What's the user agent?

We can redirect those users to horrible content. One of those blinking gif websites with loud midi music or something.

Edit: it reuses popular browser user agents and is indistinguishable. They know what they're doing.

I would amend that to basically all modern tech. It's all fucking rent seeking now. Everyone wants to be the next Google and Facebook (or to be acquired by them) and just sit on their asses and cash checks while occasionally rebooting a server.

Every tech company is headed by MBA graduates who couldn't read code if their lives depended on it and all they know how to do is order engineers to make the UX worse so they can make imaginary lines go up. I am so, so terrified of what happens to Steam when Gabe Newell retires/dies.

I do too. Those days are gone. The profit motive makes everything - even cool things - feel adversarial to me.

I feel the same way, except Facebook had its mask off right from the start. Its precursor was a site that used Zuckerberg's female classmates' photos without permission to rate their attractiveness.

Zuckerberg is also famous for calling Facebook users "dumb f**s" back in the early days of Facebook for entrusting him with all sorts of information.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/