4 ms·

Okay, maybe this is a stupid question, but: what is an agentic browser? You seem to assume that everyone knows what that means. Is this a common and well-defin

by hannob 1y ago

Okay, maybe this is a stupid question, but: what is an agentic browser? You seem to assume that everyone knows what that means. Is this a common and well-defined term that people use? I've never heard it. It would appear to me from the context that it means something like "web browser with AI stuff tackled on".

felarof 1y ago
Thanks for asking - not a stupid question at all! I should have probably explained it at the top of my post. By "agentic browser" we basically mean a browser with AI agents that can do web navigation tasks for you. So instead of you manually clicking around to reorder something on Amazon or fill out forms, the AI agent can actually navigate the site and do those tasks.
- wild_egg 1y ago
  Not to pull a "why should I use Dropbox when I have rsync" but why should we use this over adding a Playwright MCP to Claude Desktop or similar? Does having access to Chromium internals give you any super powers over connecting over the Chrome Devtools Protocol?
  - felarof 1y ago
    Yes, eventually we think there is more value of owning the entire stack than just be a MCP connector. Few ideas we were thinking of: integrating a small LLM, building MCP store into browser, building a more AI friendly DOM, etc. Even today, we use chrome's accessibility tree (a better representation of DOM for LLMs) which is not exposed via chrome extension APIs.
    - xnx 1y ago
      > Few ideas we were thinking of: integrating a small LLM Chrome has a built-in LLM: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in
    - pickpuck 1y ago
      > building a more AI friendly DOM You might consider the Accessibility Tree and its semantics. Plain divs are basically filtered out so you're left with interactive objects and some structural/layout cues.
      - faxmeyourcode 1y ago
        I've been trying (albeit not very hard) to build an accessibility library and toolset that can be exposed via mcp server. I think it has the potential to be much more ergonomic for generalized computer-use agents than stuff like playwright or the classic screenshot approach. Low latency computer use is another thing that I'd like to solve. The issue is mac and windows accessibility APIs are opaque and I have no idea what I'm doing so I'm forced to vibe code it all which is not turning out too well... :-) I suffer from mild carpal tunnel so I want to build a really low latency computer use agent that can do anything on my computer without me having to learn the talon voice syntax or some other traditional accessibility software like mac dictation.
        pickpuck 1y ago
        Neat, is it on github?
        faxmeyourcode 1y ago
        Not yet, I've gone through a few prototypes that haven't really worked. Nothing has stuck enough to really get far enough for a repo. I will try to publish something on gh this weekend.
  - shortrounddev2 1y ago
    I would take the position of "why use this when I have eyes and hands and a brain?"
    - tolerance 1y ago
      My guess is that this is for impatient people; people who think that the prescribed use cases are somehow necessary for their "workflows"; people who subscribe to terms like "cognitive friction" within the context of these use cases; people who are...sort of lazy.
      - zahlman 1y ago
        ...Why do these lazy people put so much effort into coming up with fancy words to justify that laziness?
        tolerance 1y ago
        That's a really good question. Maybe it's because laziness is associated with a lack of intellect? And certain technologies, like AI and other software, are meant to augment our intellect. These fancy words carry an intellectual/productive effect. When they're put to use it probably makes people feel like they're getting things done. And they never feel lazy because of this.
    - b0ner_t0ner 1y ago
      Why should I use a calculator when I can use an abacus?
      - faxmeyourcode 1y ago
        Why use an abacus when I can just use my fingers and toes?
    - nsonha 1y ago
      Why use any tool when you have bare hands bla bla... A good place to start is think about for example if you need to copy paste info from 100 websites to put into a spread sheet for example.
tcdent 1y ago
[flagged]
al_borland 1y ago
I first heard the term agentic about a month ago. I went from never hearing it, to hearing it 3 or 4 times in 2 days... one of which was on an internal town hall where I work, where leadership was simply using it as if the whole world already knew what it meant, instead of literally being the first time it was ever mentioned. The tl;dr is that it's AI that makes decisions on its own.
kordlessagain 1y ago
Agents are LLM responses that are feed with tools, like calculate(expression). When it encounters a thing it needs to do to meet desired output, it will run the tool. That is defining a simple agentic workflow. A complicated workflow may involve other tools. For example, the input to the LLM may produce something that tells it to set the user-agent to such and such as string: set_user_agent("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"); Other tools could be clicking on things in the page, or even injecting custom JavaScript when a page loads.

by hannob 1y ago

felarof 1y ago

Thanks for asking - not a stupid question at all! I should have probably explained it at the top of my post. By "agentic browser" we basically mean a browser with AI agents that can do web navigation tasks for you. So instead of you manually clicking around to reorder something on Amazon or fill out forms, the AI agent can actually navigate the site and do those tasks.

wild_egg 1y ago
Not to pull a "why should I use Dropbox when I have rsync" but why should we use this over adding a Playwright MCP to Claude Desktop or similar? Does having access to Chromium internals give you any super powers over connecting over the Chrome Devtools Protocol?
- felarof 1y ago
  Yes, eventually we think there is more value of owning the entire stack than just be a MCP connector. Few ideas we were thinking of: integrating a small LLM, building MCP store into browser, building a more AI friendly DOM, etc. Even today, we use chrome's accessibility tree (a better representation of DOM for LLMs) which is not exposed via chrome extension APIs.
  - xnx 1y ago
    > Few ideas we were thinking of: integrating a small LLM Chrome has a built-in LLM: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in
  - pickpuck 1y ago
    > building a more AI friendly DOM You might consider the Accessibility Tree and its semantics. Plain divs are basically filtered out so you're left with interactive objects and some structural/layout cues.
    - faxmeyourcode 1y ago
      I've been trying (albeit not very hard) to build an accessibility library and toolset that can be exposed via mcp server. I think it has the potential to be much more ergonomic for generalized computer-use agents than stuff like playwright or the classic screenshot approach. Low latency computer use is another thing that I'd like to solve. The issue is mac and windows accessibility APIs are opaque and I have no idea what I'm doing so I'm forced to vibe code it all which is not turning out too well... :-) I suffer from mild carpal tunnel so I want to build a really low latency computer use agent that can do anything on my computer without me having to learn the talon voice syntax or some other traditional accessibility software like mac dictation.
      - pickpuck 1y ago
        Neat, is it on github?
        faxmeyourcode 1y ago
        Not yet, I've gone through a few prototypes that haven't really worked. Nothing has stuck enough to really get far enough for a repo. I will try to publish something on gh this weekend.
- shortrounddev2 1y ago
  I would take the position of "why use this when I have eyes and hands and a brain?"
  - tolerance 1y ago
    My guess is that this is for impatient people; people who think that the prescribed use cases are somehow necessary for their "workflows"; people who subscribe to terms like "cognitive friction" within the context of these use cases; people who are...sort of lazy.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      ...Why do these lazy people put so much effort into coming up with fancy words to justify that laziness?
      - tolerance 1y ago
        That's a really good question. Maybe it's because laziness is associated with a lack of intellect? And certain technologies, like AI and other software, are meant to augment our intellect. These fancy words carry an intellectual/productive effect. When they're put to use it probably makes people feel like they're getting things done. And they never feel lazy because of this.
  - b0ner_t0ner 1y ago
    Why should I use a calculator when I can use an abacus?
    - faxmeyourcode 1y ago
      Why use an abacus when I can just use my fingers and toes?
  - nsonha 1y ago
    Why use any tool when you have bare hands bla bla... A good place to start is think about for example if you need to copy paste info from 100 websites to put into a spread sheet for example.

tcdent 1y ago

[flagged]

al_borland 1y ago

I first heard the term agentic about a month ago. I went from never hearing it, to hearing it 3 or 4 times in 2 days... one of which was on an internal town hall where I work, where leadership was simply using it as if the whole world already knew what it meant, instead of literally being the first time it was ever mentioned. The tl;dr is that it's AI that makes decisions on its own.

kordlessagain 1y ago

Agents are LLM responses that are feed with tools, like calculate(expression). When it encounters a thing it needs to do to meet desired output, it will run the tool. That is defining a simple agentic workflow. A complicated workflow may involve other tools. For example, the input to the LLM may produce something that tells it to set the user-agent to such and such as string: set_user_agent("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"); Other tools could be clicking on things in the page, or even injecting custom JavaScript when a page loads.