Google has pulled the plug on Project Mariner, an experimental feature designed to perform tasks for you across the web, as reported earlier by Wired’s Maxwell Zeff.
Not super surprised — the “does stuff for you across random websites” part always sounded like herding cats when half the web is popups, logins, and weird one-off flows; did Wired say whether Mariner died because it couldn’t reliably handle those login/paywall/2FA moments or was it more of a “we’re reallocating for I/O” thing? I might be wrong here.
That “agent across random websites” thing you called out feels like it immediately faceplants on 2FA/CAPTCHA/device-binding stuff—did Wired say anything concrete about whether Mariner got killed for reliability/abuse risk versus just being a “reallocating for I/O” decision? I could be wrong here.
Idk if Wired had anything more specific than the “reallocating resources” PR line, but when you mentioned 2FA/CAPTCHA/device-binding I immediately thought “ok so was Mariner basically just puppeteering your already-logged-in browser session, or was it trying to authenticate fresh like a bot? ” ngl I might be wrong here.
