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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 age

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.

ikmckenz 1y ago
Why won't these sites simply block this browser?
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  Because this browser is just chromium and its user agent will be indistinguishable
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
    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.
- Zetaphor 1y ago
  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
- xena 1y ago
  I downloaded it to see if Anubis can block it. It lies and claims to be Google Chrome.
btown 1y ago
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..."
- echelon 1y ago
  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.

ikmckenz 1y ago

Why won't these sites simply block this browser?

jazzyjackson 1y ago
Because this browser is just chromium and its user agent will be indistinguishable
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  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.
Zetaphor 1y ago
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
xena 1y ago
I downloaded it to see if Anubis can block it. It lies and claims to be Google Chrome.

btown 1y ago

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..."

echelon 1y ago
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.