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Comment by ncr100 | Hacker News Reader

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ncr100

Could this be an Extension, for Chrome / Firefox / Edge / and others ?

Are these extension-fodder:

- "new tab" shows custom UI with LLM prompt

- Reads contents of user's web page in Chat UI, shown alongside web page

- new UI gizmo at Text-selection, showing ChatGPT flower icon, with context features available for selected text

- maintains "agent personality / context" (IDK the term) across tabs

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Yes, the only reason they are building a browser is to gobble up more data.

https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/1980698199649317287

Yikes!

Market capture, again. :sigh: It's such a common motivator for digital (-adjacent) product decisions in business these days.

Chrome / Firefox / Edge and others will have their own AI implementation sooner or later. OpenAI's choice is whether they want to be a second class citizen competing with a native AI integration, or start their own country where they are the ones setting the rules.

That's what I thought: is an extension really that restrictive to where you need your own fork of a browser engine?

It appears to me like they're posturing to investors on the AI hype train. Publishing an extension isn't as sexy or "grand" as shipping a browser.

For-profit customizations (via an extension) may want to fork to avoid competitive situations such as e.g. the multi-year struggle between uBlock Origin extension and Google:

- https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/About-Google-Chrome's...

Not for-profit may fare better, tolerating and pivoting as corporate owners attempt to strategically vendor-lock-in new markets, presented to e.g. Google by the innovators of the extension.

Putting your brand name on the primary application users interact with on a computer is probably a few billion times more valuable than an extension in a thing under someone else's brand.

Yeah, but it's the same reason why Cursor forked VS-Code instead of being an extension

Controlling the full browser gives you a lot more freedom for any future additions.

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