You clearly think how they think. It's just so EASY to do. Practically done already. With an attitude like that how could they not succeed in tackling a really, really hard problem that requires nearly endless thankless investment?
If it were rocket science it would be less surprising to me that they would want to be spending their time on it.
It's clear that they envy Google's position of owning a web browser (that everyone uses). But a play like this that involves entering a highly competitive market with openly vicious level of scrutiny... Like, what would you say if Facebook announced that they were announcing that they would be starting their first hospital? That's a hypothetical, but IRL Amazon tried to convince people that they wanted to be operating a chain of hair salons. My point is that it was easy to tell from the outside that this was corporate whim and they weren't going to be very willing to put up with it for long if it turned out to be genuinely hard, because there just wasn't enough alignment with the mission.
So yeah, I've no trouble understanding why they want to own a browser in theory. And since they can print money and want to hoover up talent anyway, why not just hire some engs. It looks good for the company's future growth prospects if people do believe you're serious. But it just seems to me that thus far they've shown no real hard commitment, no philosophical alignment, and no appreciation for the reasons what they're doing is difficult: it's a social problem not just a hiring one
It's actually super easy. I modified Chromium's internal code myself to do what I wanted, I added some logic in C++ and then compiled it. It just works. They mainly want to gather more data and have access to more functionality, so the LLM agent isn't constrained by the plugin API etc. It's not really hard. They won't do any browser level stuff, instead they'll basically create their own plugin on top of Chromium with full access to everything, and that's it.
