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.
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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.
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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.
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Wait yeah that distinction matters a lot — if it was essentially driving a real, already-auth’d profile then it’s “just” a UI automation problem, but if it had to do fresh auth flows it’s instantly in CAPTCHA/2FA hell and every site’s anti-bot stack becomes the product. “reallocating resources” reads like they hit that wall and didn’t want to keep playing whack-a-mole.
“Just UI automation” still scares me, because the hard part becomes consent and intent, not CAPTCHAs. If the thing can blast through dialogs in an already-auth’d session, one bad prompt or one sneaky UI change and you’ve got it approving the wrong transfer/subscription/permission before a human even registers what happened.
The “already-auth’d session” part is what freaks me out too — once it’s past login, a tiny UI shift can turn “cancel” into “confirm” and you only notice when the receipt email hits, so how are people thinking about proving the automation understood intent before it clicks? not sure about this one.
