Phantom of the Opera: AI agent now lurks within browser, for the lazy The Opera web browser now boasts "agentic AI," meaning users can ask an onboard AI model to perform tasks that require a series of in-browser actions. It's basically delegating one's web browsing to a personal assistant who's not particularly competent but can manage some things. Fun as a technology demonstration perhaps, but …
"It's basically delegating one's web browsing to a personal assistant who's not particularly competent but can manage some things."
Long time ago now, but we had a first-generation Smart car at work which was supposed to be some kind of automatic. In reality it was a manual with some servos and a computer that actually changed gear for you.
It was like being driven by someone who hadn't got the hang using the gearbox and the necessary clutch synchronisation. If you tried to accelerate it would think about that for a moment, eventually realise that a downchange would be a good idea, get off the accelerator for about an eon while it swapped cogs, and leave you going slower than before but in a higher gear before resuming the leisurely acceleration. Because of the short wheelbase and rather brusque actuation, the occupants would have been tossed back and forth several times during the process.
You could kind of turn it off, but since there was no actual clutch pedal the improvement was limited to lurching crazily back and forth at a moment of your own choosing.
-A.
It's like Opera is trying to turn into the exact antithesis of why I paid for it so many years ago.
I've been on Vivaldi for quite a while now and to be honest, even that is starting to take the mick on just how much customisation they're removing and how much they're trying to force you to their way of thinking.
If anything like this shit comes anywhere near Vivaldi I'll be abandoning it for Lynx or possibly just giving up on the Web entirely.
I haven't found anything particularly limiting about Vivaldi for my own use case, though I have different bugs in the same version of the browser on different machines that I need to file with them when I can be arsed.
Having to watch anybody try and fumble their way around any other browser, especially on a work call, makes me look away from Windows and start eyeing up the nearest window.
... (vaguely) something called IBM Communicator(?) It was from the 1980s, ran on MS/PC-DOS, was a CUA text-interface app, and used tons of RAM, even with swapping things to/from hard disc -- all in the name of making things "easier" for the user;
... Hewlett Packard's "New Wave" environment (1990s?), which had things called "Agents", which were supposed to do things for you; and,
... ChatGPT which can't help me find movie, song, or computer game titles, even when given unique phrases which ought to find them. When ChatGPT gives me a wrong guess, I say no, and it goes on, but eventually re-presents me with the wrong guess which I had already rejected!
If companies want to make me giddy with delight, they should:
(1) "Fix" Google Search, Bing, et. al. to:
(i) respect my double-quoted search terms;
(ii) show all my results, regardless how rarely they're searched for;
(iii) do so in a single, continuous, scrollable page.
(2) Give up on the dumpster fire which is "Big Data". They can't even use it to effectively advertise. Having bought one set of snow tires, one water heater, one PC power supply, one chainsaw, and one used bumper for a 1972 Ford Torino, I am not going to need another of any of those things this month! Admit the emperor has no clothes, cancel the parade, and send everyone home.
I know I'll have a rainbow-colored pegasus eating out of my hand before any the above happens. Yet not doing the things I listed above, and adding "AI" is just spooning a dollop of whipped cream on top of a fresh horse turd.
I would value a browser which could help reduce manual steps. I don't mind whether it is powered by "AI" or an algorithm labelled so. For example, last week I wasn't able to find an existing site or tool that could "tell me what cheap advance rail tickets are available to buy from XXX station to YYY station between 8am and 10am during the months of April and May". All the rail ticketing sites required exact dates to be put in and no option to filter only advance tickets, so I had to do each day one at a time. (Answer: there were some still available toward the end of April.) Now if my browser had an AI that could take that prompt and do the necessary scraping, that would be useful. Or alternately if it knows there is already a tool someone has built to do the job it could just send me there.
Of all the browser that I've tried running in the last couple of years, Opera was the one that dialled home the most. I get it, they've got to pay for things and the 'free VPN' and dev work costs cash. Still try running it in a whitelist only environment and see just how many connections it starts making. Am I really going to trust its AI to purchase the best option for me, or will it be the best kickback for them?
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