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THIS is the main problem. I was listening the whole time for them to announce a way to run it locally or at least proxy through your local devices. Alas the Deepseek R1 distillation experience they went through (a bit like when Steve Jobs was fuming at Google for getting Android to market so quickly) made them wary of showing to many intermediate results, tricks etc. Even in the very beginning Operator v1 was unable to access many sites that blocked data-center IPs and while I went through the effort of patching in a hacky proxy-setup to be able to actually test real world performance they later locked it down even further without improving performance at all. Even when its working, its basically useless and its not working now and only getting worse. Either they make some kinda deal with eastdakota(which he is probably too savvy to agree to)or they can basically forget about doing web browsing directly from their servers.Considering, that all non web applications of "computer use" greatly benefit from local files and software (which you already have the license for!)the whole concept appears to be on the road to failure. Having their remote computer use agent perform most stuff via CLI is actually really funny when you remember that computer use advocates used to claim the whole point was NOT to rely on "outdated" pre-gui interfaces.


This is why an on device browser is coming.

It'll let the AI platforms get around any other platform blocks by hijacking the consumer's browser.

And it makes total sense, but hopefully everyone else has done the game theory at least a step or two beyond that.


You mean like calaude code's integration with play right ?


No, because playwright can be detected pretty easily and blocked. It needs to be (and will be) using the same browser that you regularly browse with.


detecting playwright is not "easy"... It can be done but its cat and mouse. Playwright in non headless mode is nearly impossible to detect.


Its the other way around: it's easier to detect because detectors are looking for specific "fingerprints" and may even try to run specific JavaScript that will only work when there is a UI present.

(Source: did a ton of web scraping and ran into a few gnarly issues and sites and had to write a p/invoke based UI automation scraper for some properties)


Perplexity already launched it.




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