Google Adds Gemini To Chrome Desktop Browser for US Users (blog.google) 56
Google has added Gemini features to Chrome for all desktop users in the US browsing in English following a limited release to paying subscribers in May. The update introduces a Gemini button in the browser that launches a chatbot capable of answering questions about page content and synthesizing information from multiple tabs. Users can remove the Gemini sparkle icon from Chrome's interface.
Google will add its AI Mode search feature to Chrome's address bar before September ends. The feature will suggest prompts based on webpage content but won't replace standard search functionality. Chrome on Android already includes Gemini features. The company plans to add agentic capabilities in coming months that would allow Gemini to perform tasks like adding items to online shopping carts by controlling the browser cursor.
Google will add its AI Mode search feature to Chrome's address bar before September ends. The feature will suggest prompts based on webpage content but won't replace standard search functionality. Chrome on Android already includes Gemini features. The company plans to add agentic capabilities in coming months that would allow Gemini to perform tasks like adding items to online shopping carts by controlling the browser cursor.
Why? (Score:2)
And (also, but not limited to) why?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Crap, meet turd. Full enshitification reached. Score.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Chromium is frozen on my desktop at the last version to fully support uBlock Origin. After they removed Manifestv2, chrome and its derivatives are no longer viable for me.
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Yep. Since clearly not enough people want this stuff. You cannot force success. You can lose a lot trying to though.
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
And (also, but not limited to) why?
Google is an advertising company, so they're probably using data they collect via your interactions with their AI in order to... you guessed it... show you ads.
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No "probably" about it. That they not do it in the EU quite clearly spells "illegal privacy violation" (with regards to the GDPR). Also, asking for consent in the EU would mean they would actually have to fully explain what data they take, how long and where it gest stored, what algorithms are applied to it. etc. They obviously do not want to explain that.
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I think the FP was supposed to be a joke or setting the stage for a joke, but yours appears to be the first attempt to actually answer the question at a non-superficial level.
However my answer was just a superficial joke: "Don't be evil" => "Be as EVIL as possible".
(Also, "All your attentions is belong to we googlers.")
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Why? Because AI is the wave of the future. It's about capturing users and market share.
Do users actually want any of this? No. Because it's not a useful feature to any of us users.
But users are going to tolerate almost anything to have a free web browser.
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Why? Because AI is the wave of the future.
Looks more and more like the same crap we already saw in the past to me ...
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Despite the commonplace backlash, there are actual uses for this.
You're on a lengthy web page, and you want a summary, or you want to find out whether it discusses a certain topic, but don't want to read the whole thing to find out. That "page" could be an entire PDF document, say, an insurance policy, and you want to know if it contains a specific exclusion, or any surprising provisions.
Here's the thing. If nobody wants this, it will go away. But the reality is, many people do want this, so I'm predicting
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That "page" could be an entire PDF document, say, an insurance policy, and you want to know if it contains a specific exclusion, or any surprising provisions.
With an unreliable tool that misses things and hallucinates? That seems like a really bad idea.
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If the answer *has* to be right, like for a legal brief or a negotiation, agreed, you should not use AI to find out about what's in a long document. But if it's more just curiosity, and the stakes are low, why not? AI gets these kinds of questions right "most" of the time. If that's good enough, then what's the problem?
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The problem is that these documents may well get designed for AI to get it wrong. They are not yet, as far as I can tell, but they will be. And then AI will not mostly get it right anymore and make you an easy target for manipulation.
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Indeed, it's an arms race, just as technology has always been an arms race. AI developers will respond by mitigating AI dark patterns, just as today's OS developers respond to malware and spam with countermeasures. And just as malware detection isn't perfect, AI dark pattern detection won't be perfect, but we'll find ways to work with the technology despite its flaws.
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Have you tried Google Search? It hallucinates unrelated links 90% of the time. In fact if one out of 10 is good, you can consider yourself lucky. And humans have even worse recall than LLMs.
Re: Why? (Score:2)
That has not been my experience, at all. I'm entirely against the concept of what they're doing (giving me a reason not to visit the websites that ultimately pay for the production and publication of information) but the AI summaries and links to related articles tend to be spot on what I'm looking for. Perhaps you can give me a (non-contrived) search to try that demonstrates your claim?
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Most people like it, even if it doesn't increase productivity, they still like using it. The penetration rate in education, science and software development is around 90%.
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They have to compete with Microsoft, who's been cramming CoPilot AI into all of their products whether you want it or not. Even using a Mac won't save you if you're using Office 365.
Hell... just today I pulled an old Windows 10 system out of storage, and one of the first things that I did was reinstall CoPilot on it even though I had removed it earlier. It's starting to feel like malware at this point.
Users can remove the sparkle icon (Score:4, Informative)
Let's state the obvious. For now.
Noticed this in firefox too (Score:1)
Firefox's sidebar has the **sparkle** button, which I only noticed a while ago. I don't know how well it integrates because I haven't used it.
I think in time, the **sparkle** will seem as quaint and outdated as "information superhighway" or "multimedia"
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I didn't know anyone actually *used* Firefox's sidebar. I always turn it off on new installs... right away, seconds after I remove Pocket.
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How do you access bookmarks and history?
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From the drop-down menus that have existed for as long as Firefox has.
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Lovely (Score:1)
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Do you know how annoying it is to tell my boss that 90% of what he is reading in ChatGPT is wrong and that you only get good answers by asking it the right way.
Me: Is there a non-zero chance that Elon Musk is actually a lizard in a human suit?
ChatGPT: Short answer: logically - yes (almost anything logically possible has a non-zero probability).
Headline: ChatGPT says Elon Musk is a lizard in a human suit.
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Indeed. The correct answer would have been that "non-zero chance" is a meaningless concept. But that would require insight and AI does not have that.
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Do you know how annoying it is to tell my boss that 90% of what he is reading in ChatGPT is wrong and that you only get good answers by asking it the right way.
If it were just your boss. But look at what gets pushed in parts of the "press" these days and who eats it up.
It's all about selling you crap (Score:3)
Agentic shopping. Of course. Because apparently all we do via our browsers is shopping. Pull your head out of your arse, Google.
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Agentic shopping. Of course. Because apparently all we do via our browsers is shopping.
Well, to paraphrase Maslow's hammer , "when all you have is advertising, everything looks like shopping".
I'm sure that Google would LOVE it if all we used our browsers for was shopping. It would both simplify their business enormously, and slash their costs.
Re: It's all about selling you crap (Score:1)
Re: It's all about selling you crap (Score:2)
It's be like a toddler secretly putting a toy into mum's trolley right before checkout.
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I'm sure that Google would LOVE it if all we used our browsers for was shopping. It would both simplify their business enormously, and slash their costs.
And that pretty much sums up one of the core reasons for enshittification: Greed. They are not fine with making tons of money. They need more and do less for that. Also nicely explains why at some point this stupidity collapses.
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Agentic shopping. Of course. Because apparently all we do via our browsers is shopping.
Well, to paraphrase Maslow's hammer , "when all you have is advertising, everything looks like shopping".
I'm sure that Google would LOVE it if all we used our browsers for was shopping. It would both simplify their business enormously, and slash their costs.
Remember in the 90s when CEOs were trying to wrap their brains around what the internet was? There were a *LOT* of public statements about how the internet is like a TV with a great big buy button on it. Thirty years later and we're almost there. If the broligarchs can just push a little harder, we're do in the actual usefulness of the net, and it'll just be a propaganda spewing hate machine with a big buy button on it with no useful utility at all.
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I don't remember that "TV with a great big buy button on it" thing, but the fact that it was a common sentiment in the parasite class doesn't surprise me.
it'll just be a propaganda spewing hate machine with a big buy button on it with no useful utility at all.
I'm hoping that instead it will bifurcate. People like us would have a more 'old-timey' internet the way it used to be. People who don't know better, or don't care, would 'enjoy' a full-on enshittified propaganda machine - a veritable carnival sideshow filled with hucksters, pickpockets, and snake-oil salesmen.
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Indeed. Some people there are hallucinating mountains of money. With the way actual disposable income is going, most people will probably get burned and then stay far away.
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In their view all that matters is that you buy something following their search result.
Maybe I'm weird, but I do want this (Score:1)
There are lots of web pages out there that are just plain too long, or too hard to read. I find it useful to be able to ask questions about such pages.
Or, a "page" could be a PDF file. Some of those are super-long and not easy to navigate. Being able to ask questions about an insurance policy, or employee handbook, or an AWS documentation page...those are all big time-savers.
There's no change to privacy here, Chrome already tracks everything you do. If you don't want this for privacy reasons, you'd better s
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OP is using AI to ask about an Insurance policy? good luck with that, at least read the citation to make sure it's not just spewing everything wrong again.
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There are lots of web pages out there that are just plain too long, or too hard to read. I find it useful to be able to ask questions about such pages.
That's mostly the fault of SEO. When a subject can be nicely written up in a paragraph or two, SEO gaming insists you break it down into neatly organized "sections" that are filled with banal nonsense that nobody in their right mind would ever want to read just so that it shows up somewhere north of page fifty on Google's search. Now that they've got enough of the Internet playing that game, they'll offer the "solution" of fucking with the data they've been pushing people to shit up with nonsense for most o
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I love the smell of ranting in the morning! I share your frustration - thanks for turning it into something I can chuckle at. ;-)
BTW, did you ever see National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation? Your comment reminded me a bit of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I love the smell of ranting in the morning! I share your frustration - thanks for turning it into something I can chuckle at. ;-)
BTW, did you ever see National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation? Your comment reminded me a bit of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The Vacation movies are a staple in my house. Clark's breakdown rants are some of the funniest moments ever put to film.
Why? (Score:2)
I can access any LLM that I want with my browser.
Why would I need one embedded in my browser?
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I can access any LLM that I want with my browser.
Why would I need one embedded in my browser?
The trick is to stop thinking this is about your choices. Then it makes perfect sense. Why compete on merit, if you can just push things on users and the lazy ones (which will be many) will just use that thing you pushed on them? Same reason MS is integrating "AI" with their crappy Office Suite and crappy OS. They do not want a market with actual competition.
Remove the button, not the service. (Score:4, Interesting)
It says remove the button preventing you from benefiting from the AI.
It says nothing about preventing the AI from collecting data in the background and sending it elsewhere.
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Why would that need that AI integration in the browser? If Chrome wants to collect user data (and other than Chromium it contains a few components that do so), they can do it without an AI interface visible to the user.
Chrome Alternative? (Score:2)
Helium [github.com] is available in Beta for MacOS and Alpha for Linux/Windows and I've been pretty impressed with it so far. Completely de-shittified and with uBlock built in.
Never got to Funny anywhere? (Score:2)
Story seemed to have lots of potential. Maybe humorous people don't use Gemini, so no jokes?