10 ms·

Gemini in Chrome

279 points by angst 1y ago

reenorap 1y ago
How is this not stealing clicks from other web pages and advertisers? There is no way that people are forgoing clicking on links at this point if they get the answers right away.
be_erik 1y ago
I don’t understand who this is for? I just tried Anthropic’s extension and it feels like writing automated selenium tests. LLMs interacting with markup is not the best abstraction layer.
- resonious 1y ago
  Right it felt pretty bad. It chugs tons of tokens just to be like "I need to scroll up!". Then 5 seconds later it scrolls up, chugs more tokens. "I need to scroll up more!"
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nextworddev 1y ago
  It’s for Google to gain complete control of the context whereever you are on the Internet
  - jama211 1y ago
    Google would control everything if they could, but this won’t achieve that and they know that so it’s not the specific intention of this. Even if you’re feeling doomerish about it.
    - nextworddev 1y ago
      Ok dude
- skybrian 1y ago
  It sounds like an alternative for passing a URL to a chat session, with the advantage that you could share web pages that require a log in. But you might want to be careful about which web pages you share this way?
- mFixman 1y ago
  My theory is that Google wants to bake Gemini into Chrome to preempt a future antitrust ruling ordering them to spin the browser out, for the same reason Microsoft made IE an integral part of Windows 98.
  - bearjaws 1y ago
    Don't have to worry about scraping rules when your end users ship all the data to you "to ask questions". That is why every AI company is making a browser.
maz1b 1y ago
I mean, is anyone really surprised that this was going to happen? Google is about to break even further away in the LLM race with this move, seeing as they will be getting an absolutely, supremely stunning amount of regular and novel data 24/7. Not everyone uses dedicated LLM interfaces, but more people I know use Google search. As Google === Search for so many. Nevertheless, it is an business savvy move to make, considering the recent ruling by the judge to not force Google to split apart or break up its business w/r/t to Chrome.
- deanmoriarty 1y ago
  What do you think this will mean for OpenAI, Anthropic and their current valuations?
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  I bet the judge already realizes how mistaken he was to let them off. Now they'll use their monopoly product to ensure monopoly control in the new market he was so sure would rein them in.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    The thing about chrome is that people use it because they like it. It's not forced or bundled with windows or iOS. A monopoly is when you do anti-competitive things, not when your product is far and away the most popular. If anything blame Firefox for dropping the ball so damn hard
    - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
      This is... a woefully uninformed statement. You realize they just lost several monopoly cases, including around Chrome? They just got off on the meaningful penalty. Google is an anticompetitive monopoly, and Chrome is an anticompetitive monopoly. This has been established by multiple courts of law. Your armchair claims to the contrary hold no water.
      - 1y ago
rvz 1y ago
Time for more security researchers to collect more money on data exfiltration reports when attackers instruct and trick LLMs to steal private user information and fall for fake websites generated by AI to accidentally send private information to attackers. Welcome to the Vibe Browsing security nightmare.
muppetman 1y ago
How do you turn it off?
- zamadatix 1y ago
  chrome://settings/ai
- weikju 1y ago
  Firefox/brave/orion/vivaldi/safari/librewolf/etc Admittedly some of them have their own AI offerings but not as invasive and can actually be turned off.
therein 1y ago
Yeah, let's have a do-over of this thread. Nice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260 Maybe someone can post the change log tomorrow and we can do it again. I'm thinking over the weekend we could post the GitHub merge of these AI features so we can give Google even more exposure. By Tuesday I hope someone will write a review of these features rehashing the same thing. I'd love to have that be upvoted to the top of HN again.
The28thDuck 1y ago
I hereby declare this to be the future! We made it folks. Time to pack it up. See you in a 2002 LAN party.
- cwmoore 1y ago
  What is LAN?
  - blooalien 1y ago
    > What is LAN? I think it's like the opposite of WAN? :shrug:
  - easeout 1y ago
    Baby don't hurt me
- dwd 1y ago
  I have a D25 Laplink Cable somewhere and maybe even a copy of Netware 4.
- alex_suzuki 1y ago
  Count me in! Do you have one of those fancy things called „hubs“ or „switches“ or are we going BNC with terminators?
- vehemenz 1y ago
  Yep. Real "metaverse" energy.
mmastrac 1y ago
Given the current err climate of thought purity, doesn't this seem a little too risky of a product to enable?
- Poomba 1y ago
  I feel like we are past that point now. The fact that AI will get things wrong has been normalized already
65 1y ago
Who wants to bet that Chrome makes this feature impossible to disable?
- onion2k 1y ago
  I'll take that bet too. You will always be able to disable it by not using Chrome.
  - amlib 1y ago
    That trick will work on android until one day google decides to ban all other browsers from it. iOS locks you down to safari already. Then web attestation and platform attestation/drm for mobile apps is eventually firmly in place and it means you can only use either android or ios for paying your bills (already a thing for most banks where I live...) or even doing mundane government bureaucracy. god, what a timeline... and even if you don't live in the country responsible for this mess you still have to suffer these consequences and everyone is so apathetic and shuts their brains off when mentioning any of these problems.
- elpakal 1y ago
  I’ll take that bet. You will be able to disable it but that won’t mean they won’t still run it.
nomilk 1y ago
I tried it on this page and says 'I don't have access' [0]. [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nx4gJA-qWodYWm-SK87Aa63i_jFAc4CD/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nx4gJA-qWodYWm-SK87Aa63i_jF...
- zamadatix 1y ago
  You need to do it via Gemini in Chrome in an updated Chrome install (roughly 140.0.7339.186 or newer) on Mac/Windows using the English language with the relevant permissions enabled in the sections under chrome://settings/ai My guess is it's either the first part (doing it via Gemini in Chrome) or the last part (permissions enabled).
  - nomilk 1y ago
    I typed @gemini in the searchbar and it turned blue and text switched to 'Ask Gemini' to indicate it worked (but it didn't work - Gemini says it doesn't have access to the screen/webpage). chrome://settings/ai redirects to chrome://settings (general settings). Manually searching 'ai' brings up dozens of other settings - stuff like 'mail' (which contains 'ai' string) - but nothing Gemini-related. On the most up to date chrome: Version 140.0.7339.186 (Official Build) (arm64) The instructional video [0] says there should be a 'Gemini' icon on the top of the Chrome browser, but I don't have one (macOS). (do I have to have a paid Gemini account for it to be there?). In any case, when OpenAI and Grok launch things, I usually just go and try them in about 20 seconds. By comparison Google's AI launches are tedious.. (thanks for the help btw) [0] https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/ https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      The "Ask Gemini" thing existed before this, between that and the lack of an AI settings page it seems it's not considering the system as one of the initial supported ones (but why specifically I'm not sure). I can confirm a paid Gemini account is not [corrected] needed. No problem, it took me a minute to get it enabled myself - not sure why it's so special cased for what it is.
zamadatix 1y ago
Similar threads today, sorted by number of comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45296416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45296416
aeon_ai 1y ago
If the forced deprecation of Ublock wasn't enough to get me off Chrome, this sure as hell is.
firefoxd 1y ago
The future of web browsing is the tiktok model. Where you don't surf the web, but the web is served to you "algorithmically". Do it long enough, and you'll be serve the pages you want and it will feel like it was your idea all along. Gemini everywhere is the first step.
- esperent 1y ago
  I wouldn't gave a major problem with this if the algorithms were tuned to my benefit. In fact, I probably prefer it since most of the web is noise that I don't need to see. So the problem isn't algorithmic content, it's closed source algorithms designed to benefit the company that made them rather than the user.
  - mikae1 1y ago
    > I wouldn't gave a major problem with this if the algorithms were tuned to my benefit. Due to the laws of enshittification they will eventually never be tuned to your benefit.
- thwarted 1y ago
  An infinite number of people at an infinite number of computers will eventually be served the content they desire.
- isodev 1y ago
  That’s the future if we leave it to the tech bros. As humans we can and should do better though.
- xnx 1y ago
  Maybe, but that sounds a lot like Google Discover, which is part of Android, the Chrome new tab page and (sometimes?) the Google home page.
  - sandspar 1y ago
    Google Discover is also remarkably bad at serving me stories I want to read, at least in my experience. One of those products that I wished worked better.
bertili 1y ago
EU: Open goal and no keeper in sight. Just a small tab. Please.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
vachina 1y ago
Google had to do this. They cannot die standing watching ChatGPT et. al. eating their ad-free lunch.
- onion2k 1y ago
  The problem with that is Google has burned so many bridges with users over the past couple of decades that moving off the ad model to some sort of paid subscription service is going to be next to impossible. People just don't trust Google any more. I know many people who happily pay OpenAI every month but wouldn't pay the same for Google Gemini even if it was better. Not to mention that actually giving Google money for anything other than an in-app purchase is oddly hard work - try buying a Google business subscription and behold an interface worse than AWS's console. Google has so much catching up to do that it's conceivable that they'll eventually fail.
paxys 1y ago
So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.
- milkshakes 1y ago
  don't worry -- they have big plans! https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-language-models/ https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
- atdt 1y ago
  It has access to the current page, so you can ask Gemini questions about its content.
- nomilk 1y ago
  I think it will be useful as a modernised ctrl+f
- qnleigh 1y ago
  > Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame. Hmm, no? It has access to all of the content of all of you're currently open tabs, and is able to parse images on web pages as well. It would be neat if it could also browse on your behalf, but that would present all kinds of security risks.
  - paxys 1y ago
    No, it can only access the tab you are currently on. And that too just the content that is already available. It can't scroll up and down to load more. It can't follow links. It can't run any actions. You'll get a ton more functionality by just taking a screenshot of the page yourself and pasting it in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.
    - IX-103 1y ago
      I'm sure that kind of functionality is coming. There's a lot of activity in the chromium repo (chrome/browser/actor/tools) that appears to be adding support for that sort of orchestration.
geor9e 1y ago
A danger with google is how flippantly they will ban google accounts for the dumbest things. Now theres a button to livesteam your browsing tied to your google account. I wonder how many people are going to lose 20 years of gmail Gphotos and GDrive files because they accidentally clicked gemini at the wrong moment on the wrong website.
- antipaul 1y ago
  The danger with google is that they suck at user experience
- TheDong 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - tuckerman 1y ago
    The line might be at least a tiny bit fuzzy: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
  - geor9e 1y ago
    Google wiped my account for posting a jpeg of a credit card form with "THIS POST ONLY VIEWABLE WITH GOOGLE+ GOLD" to their old social media site. Gmail,Gdrive, everything tied to the account gone forever. They would only tell me it got flagged "phishing". The TOS has a laundry list of words to ban you under. Whichever reason their overseas moderation farm clicks, after looking 0.7 seconds at a screengrab flagged by a hallucinating AI, isn't ever going to be reviewed by anyone further. There's no support or appeal path for a free account.
  - BrawnyBadger53 1y ago
    Except people take photos of their kids all the time and there is precedent of parents losing their Google accounts for this. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
- 1y ago
atonse 1y ago
Blah. On the one hand, this is where the monopoly power of putting Gemini in Chrome should be looked into by the DOJ. On the other hand, this might make me switch back to chrome. These are all things Apple could build into safari, but they're nowhere to be seen. They'll be stuck solving yesterday's problems (like building an infinitesimally better camera for the latest iPhone), but not at all integrating any AI into them.
albert_e 1y ago
Microsoft baked in Copilot into Edge more than a year ago. It was forced into Windows task bar as well. This seems to be in the same vein.
- aucisson_masque 1y ago
  Use macOS or Linux, don’t use chrome. The are getting tinier everyday.
- wunderwuzzi23 1y ago
  Much longer actually, Bing Chat in Edge came out more than 2+ years ago.
SilverElfin 1y ago
Google taking advantage of their anti competitive monopolies
Razengan 1y ago
Isn't Google putting AI results at the top some sort of conflict of interest? Like if users can just get the info they want right at Google.com why would they click through to any of the search results? Isn't that stealing clicks from websites?
- eclipxe 1y ago
  Stealing clicks? What obligation does Google have to send traffic to a site?
  - Razengan 1y ago
    What if that site paid for ads or to appear at the top of search results? Google's AI crap appears above even sponsored sites.
EZ-E 1y ago
We need a [US Only] tag on the thread title, I almost got excited
keyle 1y ago
You didn't want it in your computer, bang, it's there! You didn't want it in your phone, bang, it's there! You didn't want it in your browser, bang, it's there! Next, coming to a fridge near you! /s
- blooalien 1y ago
  > Next, coming to a fridge near you! /s Well, with Samsung forcing ads on their "smart" fridges [0], Google + AI can't be far behind. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292666
- citizenfishy 1y ago
  Gilfoyle will sort that
mmaunder 1y ago
Ok Google employees, please quit the vote brigading.
chartered_stack 1y ago
Honestly, it would be great if it were "Gemma in Chrome" instead. A local model capable enough to do the things that this is designed to do? Yes please. Gemini in Chrome is a way to increase adoption. Gemma in Chrome is an innovation - a platform that allows developers to build stuff leveraging the local model. A step closer to a world where we can talk to our computers and have them do what we mean instead of what we say.
iansinnott 1y ago
Hopefully this will not affect other browser that are downstream of Chromium.
ghssds 1y ago
For one second, I thought Chrome now supported the Gemini protocol. Then I came back to reality. > To use Gemini in Chrome on your computer, you need to: Be 18 or over and in the US. Use a Mac or Windows computer. Use the latest version of Chrome. Learn how to update Chrome. Sign in to Chrome. This feature isn’t available in Incognito mode. Learn how to sign in to Chrome. Have Chrome’s language set to English (United States). Why can't I set Chrome to whichever language I may want and still have that Gemini thing in english?
zmmmmm 1y ago
I spent 10 mins trying to find a clear statement of whether Google uses information submitted to Gemini for training and I couldn't find one. It is hard not to come to the conclusion they actively try to obfuscate it because there are many statements that vaguely sound like they should address it but then don't properly do that. So I would have to suggest, use these features with extreme caution on any page you consider private if you aren't prepared for your private information to get sucked into Google's Gemini training data.
- wodenokoto 1y ago
  We had legal trying to figure out if data submitted to Google Cloud was shared with Google, and the conclusion was that it is unclear from their TOS. Their TOS is a bunch of circular references to different agreements.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- redml 1y ago
  being privacy centric is a badge of honor these days, so if they aren't making it clear or not giving an easy to find option, then it's a guaranteed to your queries and outputs are used for training.
- holoduke 1y ago
  Or course they are using it. With Google even this keyboard stroke on Android is used for something.
  - frays 1y ago
    This claim, without a source, runs the risk of being misinformation, which is a massive problem in 2025. Can you provide a reliable source to verify it?
    - colonelxc 1y ago
admiralrohan 1y ago
Inevitable.
yreg 1y ago
Tangential: Do you have any recommendations for webdev LLM tools? I would like to inspect some part of the DOM and chat about it with an LLM, including the CSS rules that are applied to each subnode in my selection.
- badlogic 1y ago
  Chrome dev console has Gemini integrated as well. Otherwise pick any coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, opencode, ...) give it the Playwright MCP and ask away.
stephen_cagle 1y ago
Damn, not even a month after getting a butterfly kiss of a slap on the wrist for abusing their monopoly position... and they are already pulling this? Thank god we have strong regulation in the US to protect us. /s
- lihaciudanieljr 1y ago
  [dead]
mosselman 1y ago
This seems ridiculously simple. It doesn’t browse for you in the background or lets you reference tabs etc. This just seems to pass the current page to an llm. I built an extension like this with Claude-code a few days ago because I wanted to see if I could replace the ai feature of Firefox when I switched to LibreWolf. Turns out, it was quite easy for Claude code. I want a bit further and tried to get the extension to browse around. Individual actions worked, but I couldn’t get it to follow a plan. In the end I finally looked around the code and Claude had made a huge mess with cursor etc. The complexity of handling the array of messages was a bit too much for the AI agents. I now have the same as this Gemini ai though and it CAN click links and it works with ollama too. So more private. All in a few hours of development. So I am not impressed by Google here
- Yoric 1y ago
  If I recall correctly, the main selling point of Firefox AI is that it's offline by default, which means that it doesn't rack up your token bill and doesn't expose your data.
  - simonw 1y ago
    No, Firefox out of the box has an AI side panel with options to use Claude. Most machines won't run a good enough local model so they don't default to that.
    - lxgr 1y ago
      Firefox does several other things with AI too, and many of them locally, e.g. suggesting tab group names, suggesting other tabs to add to existing groups, auto-generating alt texts for images pasted into edited PDFs – each supported by a dedicated local model! You can see which ones your Firefox installation has already fetched and their purpose on about:addons. More about this here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models On top of that, current mobile versions (and weirdly enough only mobile versions) can now also summarize articles using Apple Intelligence (where available) or Mozilla-hosted remote inference: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/shake-to-summarize/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/shake-to-summarize/
prakhar897 1y ago
wondering if we can use it with playwright/puppeteer. would be a godsend for scrapers if they can identify useful data.
bambax 1y ago
> Assouvissez votre créativité sans changer de page > Have a question about what you're reading? Ask Gemini. It uses the context of your open tabs to provide relevant answers and explanations, keeping you focused. In France some bits of the page are localized, some are still in English -- doesn't project professionalism or inspire confidence.
- wiether 1y ago
  Ils avaient probablement dépassé leur quota de tokens pour faire traduire la page par Gemini...
verytrivial 1y ago
I stopped using Chrome when they started doing the "logged in to Chrome" thing for all Google services. It seemed likely a creepy step in a vaguely defined, unknown direction. The signal seems stronger now.
- NaomiLehman 1y ago
  you don't need to be logged in atm, AFAIK
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    I believe they're talking about the mechanism where logging into Chrome automatically signs you into many of Google's services across the web.
    - worldsavior 1y ago
      What's wrong with that? That's the purpose of logging into chrome.
      - mort96 1y ago
        For me, the purpose of logging in to my Mozilla account in Firefox is to sync saved passwords and tabs between devices. If I was a Chrome user, I would want to log in to Chrome for the same reason.
      - verytrivial 1y ago
        The problem for me is the fusing of the browser with a preferred 'platform' of services. I don't want a partisan browser.
      - hooverd 1y ago
        Chrome is a browser, not your Google account?
      - dns_snek 1y ago
        The purpose of logging into a browser has always been to synchronize bookmarks, settings, and extensions.
gyosko 1y ago
Damn, the future is more and more distopic every day.
captainepoch 1y ago
I hope Brave deletes this from Chromium if it's present in the source code.
daft_pink 1y ago
I was really upset when I found out that my $20 a month Gemini AI Pro subscription only only included privacy features if stopped using the chat history feature. Gosh I hate google products.
- nicce 1y ago
  They just introduced endless nagging in AI Studio to enable Drive integration, if you disallowed it. They really want your data!
  - 0x6c6f6c 1y ago
    If your data is already in Drive haven't you already given them it?
    - nicce 1y ago
      It isn't because I have never enabled the feature? All the sessions have been temporary. Now it started complaining about that. It didn't do that before.
gloosx 1y ago
Obvious mousetrap. Imagine shovelling all this stuff at users for "free". I'm switching to my own Chrominium builds...
cynicalsecurity 1y ago
Another reason to ditch Chrome. It's becoming an even more horrible bloatware.
imiric 1y ago
> Your web, your control Typical corporate doublespeak. The web is neither "mine", nor am I ever in control. If anything, the web belongs to corporations like Google. By integrating their text prediction, summarization, and hallucination engine into their web browser, they're further cementing their position of control.
deviation 1y ago
Knew this was coming thanks to their chrome API's for on-device gen-AI (summarize, translate, generate, etc). I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner... The amount of data available from Chrome users seems enormous.
SpaceL10n 1y ago
Does anyone know if they are embedding Gemini in chromium and will it eventually be available in nwjs?
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Chromium has been building APIs to support fetching on device models so that Chrome can fetch Gemini-nano to run locally. I'm not familiar if nwjs has any plans to do something with that functionality or not though.
lionkor 1y ago
"This will be so good, just wait! And until then, get used to it!", just like AGI and shitty chatbots that are subtly wrong most of the time.
hankman86 1y ago
I would love to see usage metrics on that. Probably well below 1% of all browsing sessions, quite possibly even less than 0.1%. Nobody asked to this. Interpreting websites for its users is categorically not what a web browser is for.
- lxgr 1y ago
  Summarizing a long article (possibly in a language I don't speak), querying it for specific information without having to come up with an exact greppable substring etc. is absolute what web browsers are for.
Michael_Keller 1y ago
[dead]
tzury 1y ago
Google's strategic execution with Gemini over the last two quarters has been impressive. Its deep integration into core products—from the consumer-facing Workspace and Search to developer platforms like Google Cloud and Colab—demonstrates a cohesive, ecosystem-wide approach. This period marks Google's transition from a preparatory phase to an aggressive market push, which is thus far yielding significant momentum. This contrasts with the apparent friction in the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, where long-term strategic alignment seems uncertain. Furthermore, there's a growing perception that competitors like Anthropic are achieving superior performance in specialized domains like software engineering. This suggests OpenAI's current model, which appears heavily focused on optimizing its existing architecture, may be approaching diminishing returns on genuine innovation.
ukuina 1y ago
This is why other "AI browsers" that parse and simplify the DOM, then invoke a tool-calling LLM over text are at EOL. Once Chrome integrates Gemini Live amd treats your browser as a video input stream, it's pixels all the way. No lag, no incorrect clicks on hidden elements.
SirMaster 1y ago
How do we get it out?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
m3kw9 1y ago
One thing apple should do is to allow you to chat with the Safari Reader summary to ask questions. The giant machine is too big to move fast. Given this, i still won't use Chrome.
croemer 1y ago
> Gemini in Chrome is rolling out to all eligible Mac and Windows users in the US who have their Chrome language set to English. We look forward to bringing this feature to more people and additional languages soon

279 points by angst 1y ago

How is this not stealing clicks from other web pages and advertisers? There is no way that people are forgoing clicking on links at this point if they get the answers right away.

be_erik 1y ago

I don’t understand who this is for? I just tried Anthropic’s extension and it feels like writing automated selenium tests. LLMs interacting with markup is not the best abstraction layer.

resonious 1y ago
Right it felt pretty bad. It chugs tons of tokens just to be like "I need to scroll up!". Then 5 seconds later it scrolls up, chugs more tokens. "I need to scroll up more!"
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
nextworddev 1y ago
It’s for Google to gain complete control of the context whereever you are on the Internet
- jama211 1y ago
  Google would control everything if they could, but this won’t achieve that and they know that so it’s not the specific intention of this. Even if you’re feeling doomerish about it.
  - nextworddev 1y ago
    Ok dude
skybrian 1y ago
It sounds like an alternative for passing a URL to a chat session, with the advantage that you could share web pages that require a log in. But you might want to be careful about which web pages you share this way?
mFixman 1y ago
My theory is that Google wants to bake Gemini into Chrome to preempt a future antitrust ruling ordering them to spin the browser out, for the same reason Microsoft made IE an integral part of Windows 98.
- bearjaws 1y ago
  Don't have to worry about scraping rules when your end users ship all the data to you "to ask questions". That is why every AI company is making a browser.

maz1b 1y ago

I mean, is anyone really surprised that this was going to happen? Google is about to break even further away in the LLM race with this move, seeing as they will be getting an absolutely, supremely stunning amount of regular and novel data 24/7. Not everyone uses dedicated LLM interfaces, but more people I know use Google search. As Google === Search for so many. Nevertheless, it is an business savvy move to make, considering the recent ruling by the judge to not force Google to split apart or break up its business w/r/t to Chrome.

deanmoriarty 1y ago
What do you think this will mean for OpenAI, Anthropic and their current valuations?
ocdtrekkie 1y ago
I bet the judge already realizes how mistaken he was to let them off. Now they'll use their monopoly product to ensure monopoly control in the new market he was so sure would rein them in.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  The thing about chrome is that people use it because they like it. It's not forced or bundled with windows or iOS. A monopoly is when you do anti-competitive things, not when your product is far and away the most popular. If anything blame Firefox for dropping the ball so damn hard
  - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    This is... a woefully uninformed statement. You realize they just lost several monopoly cases, including around Chrome? They just got off on the meaningful penalty. Google is an anticompetitive monopoly, and Chrome is an anticompetitive monopoly. This has been established by multiple courts of law. Your armchair claims to the contrary hold no water.
    - 1y ago

rvz 1y ago

Time for more security researchers to collect more money on data exfiltration reports when attackers instruct and trick LLMs to steal private user information and fall for fake websites generated by AI to accidentally send private information to attackers. Welcome to the Vibe Browsing security nightmare.

muppetman 1y ago

How do you turn it off?

zamadatix 1y ago
chrome://settings/ai
weikju 1y ago
Firefox/brave/orion/vivaldi/safari/librewolf/etc Admittedly some of them have their own AI offerings but not as invasive and can actually be turned off.

therein 1y ago

Yeah, let's have a do-over of this thread. Nice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260 Maybe someone can post the change log tomorrow and we can do it again. I'm thinking over the weekend we could post the GitHub merge of these AI features so we can give Google even more exposure. By Tuesday I hope someone will write a review of these features rehashing the same thing. I'd love to have that be upvoted to the top of HN again.

The28thDuck 1y ago

I hereby declare this to be the future! We made it folks. Time to pack it up. See you in a 2002 LAN party.

cwmoore 1y ago
What is LAN?
- blooalien 1y ago
  > What is LAN? I think it's like the opposite of WAN? :shrug:
- easeout 1y ago
  Baby don't hurt me
dwd 1y ago
I have a D25 Laplink Cable somewhere and maybe even a copy of Netware 4.
alex_suzuki 1y ago
Count me in! Do you have one of those fancy things called „hubs“ or „switches“ or are we going BNC with terminators?
vehemenz 1y ago
Yep. Real "metaverse" energy.

mmastrac 1y ago

Given the current err climate of thought purity, doesn't this seem a little too risky of a product to enable?

Poomba 1y ago
I feel like we are past that point now. The fact that AI will get things wrong has been normalized already

65 1y ago

Who wants to bet that Chrome makes this feature impossible to disable?

onion2k 1y ago
I'll take that bet too. You will always be able to disable it by not using Chrome.
- amlib 1y ago
  That trick will work on android until one day google decides to ban all other browsers from it. iOS locks you down to safari already. Then web attestation and platform attestation/drm for mobile apps is eventually firmly in place and it means you can only use either android or ios for paying your bills (already a thing for most banks where I live...) or even doing mundane government bureaucracy. god, what a timeline... and even if you don't live in the country responsible for this mess you still have to suffer these consequences and everyone is so apathetic and shuts their brains off when mentioning any of these problems.
elpakal 1y ago
I’ll take that bet. You will be able to disable it but that won’t mean they won’t still run it.

nomilk 1y ago

I tried it on this page and says 'I don't have access' [0]. [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nx4gJA-qWodYWm-SK87Aa63i_jFAc4CD/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nx4gJA-qWodYWm-SK87Aa63i_jF...

zamadatix 1y ago
You need to do it via Gemini in Chrome in an updated Chrome install (roughly 140.0.7339.186 or newer) on Mac/Windows using the English language with the relevant permissions enabled in the sections under chrome://settings/ai My guess is it's either the first part (doing it via Gemini in Chrome) or the last part (permissions enabled).
- nomilk 1y ago
  I typed @gemini in the searchbar and it turned blue and text switched to 'Ask Gemini' to indicate it worked (but it didn't work - Gemini says it doesn't have access to the screen/webpage). chrome://settings/ai redirects to chrome://settings (general settings). Manually searching 'ai' brings up dozens of other settings - stuff like 'mail' (which contains 'ai' string) - but nothing Gemini-related. On the most up to date chrome: Version 140.0.7339.186 (Official Build) (arm64) The instructional video [0] says there should be a 'Gemini' icon on the top of the Chrome browser, but I don't have one (macOS). (do I have to have a paid Gemini account for it to be there?). In any case, when OpenAI and Grok launch things, I usually just go and try them in about 20 seconds. By comparison Google's AI launches are tedious.. (thanks for the help btw) [0] https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/ https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    The "Ask Gemini" thing existed before this, between that and the lack of an AI settings page it seems it's not considering the system as one of the initial supported ones (but why specifically I'm not sure). I can confirm a paid Gemini account is not [corrected] needed. No problem, it took me a minute to get it enabled myself - not sure why it's so special cased for what it is.

zamadatix 1y ago

Similar threads today, sorted by number of comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45296416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45296416

aeon_ai 1y ago

If the forced deprecation of Ublock wasn't enough to get me off Chrome, this sure as hell is.

firefoxd 1y ago

The future of web browsing is the tiktok model. Where you don't surf the web, but the web is served to you "algorithmically". Do it long enough, and you'll be serve the pages you want and it will feel like it was your idea all along. Gemini everywhere is the first step.

esperent 1y ago
I wouldn't gave a major problem with this if the algorithms were tuned to my benefit. In fact, I probably prefer it since most of the web is noise that I don't need to see. So the problem isn't algorithmic content, it's closed source algorithms designed to benefit the company that made them rather than the user.
- mikae1 1y ago
  > I wouldn't gave a major problem with this if the algorithms were tuned to my benefit. Due to the laws of enshittification they will eventually never be tuned to your benefit.
thwarted 1y ago
An infinite number of people at an infinite number of computers will eventually be served the content they desire.
isodev 1y ago
That’s the future if we leave it to the tech bros. As humans we can and should do better though.
xnx 1y ago
Maybe, but that sounds a lot like Google Discover, which is part of Android, the Chrome new tab page and (sometimes?) the Google home page.
- sandspar 1y ago
  Google Discover is also remarkably bad at serving me stories I want to read, at least in my experience. One of those products that I wished worked better.

bertili 1y ago

EU: Open goal and no keeper in sight. Just a small tab. Please.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

vachina 1y ago

Google had to do this. They cannot die standing watching ChatGPT et. al. eating their ad-free lunch.

onion2k 1y ago
The problem with that is Google has burned so many bridges with users over the past couple of decades that moving off the ad model to some sort of paid subscription service is going to be next to impossible. People just don't trust Google any more. I know many people who happily pay OpenAI every month but wouldn't pay the same for Google Gemini even if it was better. Not to mention that actually giving Google money for anything other than an in-app purchase is oddly hard work - try buying a Google business subscription and behold an interface worse than AWS's console. Google has so much catching up to do that it's conceivable that they'll eventually fail.

paxys 1y ago

So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.

milkshakes 1y ago
don't worry -- they have big plans! https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-language-models/ https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
atdt 1y ago
It has access to the current page, so you can ask Gemini questions about its content.
nomilk 1y ago
I think it will be useful as a modernised ctrl+f
qnleigh 1y ago
> Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame. Hmm, no? It has access to all of the content of all of you're currently open tabs, and is able to parse images on web pages as well. It would be neat if it could also browse on your behalf, but that would present all kinds of security risks.
- paxys 1y ago
  No, it can only access the tab you are currently on. And that too just the content that is already available. It can't scroll up and down to load more. It can't follow links. It can't run any actions. You'll get a ton more functionality by just taking a screenshot of the page yourself and pasting it in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.
  - IX-103 1y ago
    I'm sure that kind of functionality is coming. There's a lot of activity in the chromium repo (chrome/browser/actor/tools) that appears to be adding support for that sort of orchestration.

geor9e 1y ago

A danger with google is how flippantly they will ban google accounts for the dumbest things. Now theres a button to livesteam your browsing tied to your google account. I wonder how many people are going to lose 20 years of gmail Gphotos and GDrive files because they accidentally clicked gemini at the wrong moment on the wrong website.

antipaul 1y ago
The danger with google is that they suck at user experience
TheDong 1y ago
[flagged]
- tuckerman 1y ago
  The line might be at least a tiny bit fuzzy: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
- geor9e 1y ago
  Google wiped my account for posting a jpeg of a credit card form with "THIS POST ONLY VIEWABLE WITH GOOGLE+ GOLD" to their old social media site. Gmail,Gdrive, everything tied to the account gone forever. They would only tell me it got flagged "phishing". The TOS has a laundry list of words to ban you under. Whichever reason their overseas moderation farm clicks, after looking 0.7 seconds at a screengrab flagged by a hallucinating AI, isn't ever going to be reviewed by anyone further. There's no support or appeal path for a free account.
- BrawnyBadger53 1y ago
  Except people take photos of their kids all the time and there is precedent of parents losing their Google accounts for this. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
1y ago

atonse 1y ago

Blah. On the one hand, this is where the monopoly power of putting Gemini in Chrome should be looked into by the DOJ. On the other hand, this might make me switch back to chrome. These are all things Apple could build into safari, but they're nowhere to be seen. They'll be stuck solving yesterday's problems (like building an infinitesimally better camera for the latest iPhone), but not at all integrating any AI into them.

albert_e 1y ago

Microsoft baked in Copilot into Edge more than a year ago. It was forced into Windows task bar as well. This seems to be in the same vein.

aucisson_masque 1y ago
Use macOS or Linux, don’t use chrome. The are getting tinier everyday.
wunderwuzzi23 1y ago
Much longer actually, Bing Chat in Edge came out more than 2+ years ago.

SilverElfin 1y ago

Google taking advantage of their anti competitive monopolies

Razengan 1y ago

Isn't Google putting AI results at the top some sort of conflict of interest? Like if users can just get the info they want right at Google.com why would they click through to any of the search results? Isn't that stealing clicks from websites?

eclipxe 1y ago
Stealing clicks? What obligation does Google have to send traffic to a site?
- Razengan 1y ago
  What if that site paid for ads or to appear at the top of search results? Google's AI crap appears above even sponsored sites.

EZ-E 1y ago

We need a [US Only] tag on the thread title, I almost got excited

keyle 1y ago

You didn't want it in your computer, bang, it's there! You didn't want it in your phone, bang, it's there! You didn't want it in your browser, bang, it's there! Next, coming to a fridge near you! /s

blooalien 1y ago
> Next, coming to a fridge near you! /s Well, with Samsung forcing ads on their "smart" fridges [0], Google + AI can't be far behind. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292666
citizenfishy 1y ago
Gilfoyle will sort that

mmaunder 1y ago

Ok Google employees, please quit the vote brigading.

chartered_stack 1y ago

Honestly, it would be great if it were "Gemma in Chrome" instead. A local model capable enough to do the things that this is designed to do? Yes please. Gemini in Chrome is a way to increase adoption. Gemma in Chrome is an innovation - a platform that allows developers to build stuff leveraging the local model. A step closer to a world where we can talk to our computers and have them do what we mean instead of what we say.

iansinnott 1y ago

Hopefully this will not affect other browser that are downstream of Chromium.

ghssds 1y ago

For one second, I thought Chrome now supported the Gemini protocol. Then I came back to reality. > To use Gemini in Chrome on your computer, you need to: Be 18 or over and in the US. Use a Mac or Windows computer. Use the latest version of Chrome. Learn how to update Chrome. Sign in to Chrome. This feature isn’t available in Incognito mode. Learn how to sign in to Chrome. Have Chrome’s language set to English (United States). Why can't I set Chrome to whichever language I may want and still have that Gemini thing in english?

zmmmmm 1y ago

I spent 10 mins trying to find a clear statement of whether Google uses information submitted to Gemini for training and I couldn't find one. It is hard not to come to the conclusion they actively try to obfuscate it because there are many statements that vaguely sound like they should address it but then don't properly do that. So I would have to suggest, use these features with extreme caution on any page you consider private if you aren't prepared for your private information to get sucked into Google's Gemini training data.

wodenokoto 1y ago
We had legal trying to figure out if data submitted to Google Cloud was shared with Google, and the conclusion was that it is unclear from their TOS. Their TOS is a bunch of circular references to different agreements.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
redml 1y ago
being privacy centric is a badge of honor these days, so if they aren't making it clear or not giving an easy to find option, then it's a guaranteed to your queries and outputs are used for training.
holoduke 1y ago
Or course they are using it. With Google even this keyboard stroke on Android is used for something.
- frays 1y ago
  This claim, without a source, runs the risk of being misinformation, which is a massive problem in 2025. Can you provide a reliable source to verify it?
  - colonelxc 1y ago

admiralrohan 1y ago

Inevitable.

yreg 1y ago

Tangential: Do you have any recommendations for webdev LLM tools? I would like to inspect some part of the DOM and chat about it with an LLM, including the CSS rules that are applied to each subnode in my selection.

badlogic 1y ago
Chrome dev console has Gemini integrated as well. Otherwise pick any coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, opencode, ...) give it the Playwright MCP and ask away.

stephen_cagle 1y ago

Damn, not even a month after getting a butterfly kiss of a slap on the wrist for abusing their monopoly position... and they are already pulling this? Thank god we have strong regulation in the US to protect us. /s

lihaciudanieljr 1y ago
[dead]

mosselman 1y ago

This seems ridiculously simple. It doesn’t browse for you in the background or lets you reference tabs etc. This just seems to pass the current page to an llm. I built an extension like this with Claude-code a few days ago because I wanted to see if I could replace the ai feature of Firefox when I switched to LibreWolf. Turns out, it was quite easy for Claude code. I want a bit further and tried to get the extension to browse around. Individual actions worked, but I couldn’t get it to follow a plan. In the end I finally looked around the code and Claude had made a huge mess with cursor etc. The complexity of handling the array of messages was a bit too much for the AI agents. I now have the same as this Gemini ai though and it CAN click links and it works with ollama too. So more private. All in a few hours of development. So I am not impressed by Google here

Yoric 1y ago
If I recall correctly, the main selling point of Firefox AI is that it's offline by default, which means that it doesn't rack up your token bill and doesn't expose your data.
- simonw 1y ago
  No, Firefox out of the box has an AI side panel with options to use Claude. Most machines won't run a good enough local model so they don't default to that.
  - lxgr 1y ago
    Firefox does several other things with AI too, and many of them locally, e.g. suggesting tab group names, suggesting other tabs to add to existing groups, auto-generating alt texts for images pasted into edited PDFs – each supported by a dedicated local model! You can see which ones your Firefox installation has already fetched and their purpose on about:addons. More about this here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models On top of that, current mobile versions (and weirdly enough only mobile versions) can now also summarize articles using Apple Intelligence (where available) or Mozilla-hosted remote inference: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/shake-to-summarize/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/shake-to-summarize/

prakhar897 1y ago

wondering if we can use it with playwright/puppeteer. would be a godsend for scrapers if they can identify useful data.

bambax 1y ago

> Assouvissez votre créativité sans changer de page > Have a question about what you're reading? Ask Gemini. It uses the context of your open tabs to provide relevant answers and explanations, keeping you focused. In France some bits of the page are localized, some are still in English -- doesn't project professionalism or inspire confidence.

wiether 1y ago
Ils avaient probablement dépassé leur quota de tokens pour faire traduire la page par Gemini...

verytrivial 1y ago

I stopped using Chrome when they started doing the "logged in to Chrome" thing for all Google services. It seemed likely a creepy step in a vaguely defined, unknown direction. The signal seems stronger now.

NaomiLehman 1y ago
you don't need to be logged in atm, AFAIK
- dns_snek 1y ago
  I believe they're talking about the mechanism where logging into Chrome automatically signs you into many of Google's services across the web.
  - worldsavior 1y ago
    What's wrong with that? That's the purpose of logging into chrome.
    - mort96 1y ago
      For me, the purpose of logging in to my Mozilla account in Firefox is to sync saved passwords and tabs between devices. If I was a Chrome user, I would want to log in to Chrome for the same reason.
    - verytrivial 1y ago
      The problem for me is the fusing of the browser with a preferred 'platform' of services. I don't want a partisan browser.
    - hooverd 1y ago
      Chrome is a browser, not your Google account?
    - dns_snek 1y ago
      The purpose of logging into a browser has always been to synchronize bookmarks, settings, and extensions.

gyosko 1y ago

Damn, the future is more and more distopic every day.

captainepoch 1y ago

I hope Brave deletes this from Chromium if it's present in the source code.

daft_pink 1y ago

I was really upset when I found out that my $20 a month Gemini AI Pro subscription only only included privacy features if stopped using the chat history feature. Gosh I hate google products.

nicce 1y ago
They just introduced endless nagging in AI Studio to enable Drive integration, if you disallowed it. They really want your data!
- 0x6c6f6c 1y ago
  If your data is already in Drive haven't you already given them it?
  - nicce 1y ago
    It isn't because I have never enabled the feature? All the sessions have been temporary. Now it started complaining about that. It didn't do that before.

gloosx 1y ago

Obvious mousetrap. Imagine shovelling all this stuff at users for "free". I'm switching to my own Chrominium builds...

cynicalsecurity 1y ago

Another reason to ditch Chrome. It's becoming an even more horrible bloatware.

imiric 1y ago

> Your web, your control Typical corporate doublespeak. The web is neither "mine", nor am I ever in control. If anything, the web belongs to corporations like Google. By integrating their text prediction, summarization, and hallucination engine into their web browser, they're further cementing their position of control.

deviation 1y ago

Knew this was coming thanks to their chrome API's for on-device gen-AI (summarize, translate, generate, etc). I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner... The amount of data available from Chrome users seems enormous.

SpaceL10n 1y ago

Does anyone know if they are embedding Gemini in chromium and will it eventually be available in nwjs?

zamadatix 1y ago
Chromium has been building APIs to support fetching on device models so that Chrome can fetch Gemini-nano to run locally. I'm not familiar if nwjs has any plans to do something with that functionality or not though.

lionkor 1y ago

"This will be so good, just wait! And until then, get used to it!", just like AGI and shitty chatbots that are subtly wrong most of the time.

hankman86 1y ago

I would love to see usage metrics on that. Probably well below 1% of all browsing sessions, quite possibly even less than 0.1%. Nobody asked to this. Interpreting websites for its users is categorically not what a web browser is for.

lxgr 1y ago
Summarizing a long article (possibly in a language I don't speak), querying it for specific information without having to come up with an exact greppable substring etc. is absolute what web browsers are for.

Michael_Keller 1y ago

[dead]

tzury 1y ago

Google's strategic execution with Gemini over the last two quarters has been impressive. Its deep integration into core products—from the consumer-facing Workspace and Search to developer platforms like Google Cloud and Colab—demonstrates a cohesive, ecosystem-wide approach. This period marks Google's transition from a preparatory phase to an aggressive market push, which is thus far yielding significant momentum. This contrasts with the apparent friction in the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, where long-term strategic alignment seems uncertain. Furthermore, there's a growing perception that competitors like Anthropic are achieving superior performance in specialized domains like software engineering. This suggests OpenAI's current model, which appears heavily focused on optimizing its existing architecture, may be approaching diminishing returns on genuine innovation.

ukuina 1y ago

This is why other "AI browsers" that parse and simplify the DOM, then invoke a tool-calling LLM over text are at EOL. Once Chrome integrates Gemini Live amd treats your browser as a video input stream, it's pixels all the way. No lag, no incorrect clicks on hidden elements.

SirMaster 1y ago

How do we get it out?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

m3kw9 1y ago

One thing apple should do is to allow you to chat with the Safari Reader summary to ask questions. The giant machine is too big to move fast. Given this, i still won't use Chrome.

croemer 1y ago

> Gemini in Chrome is rolling out to all eligible Mac and Windows users in the US who have their Chrome language set to English. We look forward to bringing this feature to more people and additional languages soon