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WebMCP is available for early preview

developer.chrome.com

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Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#61

Post by socalgal2 »

avaer wrote: post #41
BeefySwain wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what the hell is going on here? Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever, or do websites want you to be able to automate things? Because I don't see how you can have both. If I'm using Selenium it's a problem, but if I'm using Claude it's fine??

In a nutshell: Google wants your websites to be more easily used by the agents they are putting in the browser and other products. They own the user layer and models, and get to decide if your product will be used. Think search monopoly, except your site doesn't even exist as far as users are concerned, it's only used via an agent, and only if Google allows. The work of implementing this is on you. Google is building…

The Google hate virus is thick here. It seems uncontroversial that users will likely want to use AI to find info for them and do things for them. So either Google provides users with what they want or they go out of business to some other company that provides what users want.

https://www.perplexity.ai/comet

https://chatgpt.com/atlas/

https://arc.net/max

That is not in any way to suggest companies are ok to do bad things. I don't see anything bad here. I just see the inevitable. People are going to want to ask some AI for whatever they used to get from the internet. Many are already doing this. Who ever enables that for users best will get the users.

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#62

Post by kgwxd »

thayne wrote: post #23
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #2

>Users could more easily get the exact flights they want Can we stop pretending this is an issue anyone has ever had.

Well I have had the problem of "I want to find the cheapest flight that leaves during this range of dates, and returns during this range of dates, but isn't early in the morning or late at night, and includes additional fees for the luggage I need in the price comparison" and current search tools can't do that very well. I'm not very optimistic WebMCP would solve that though.

That's what everyone wants, and if everyone can easily find it, it'll be worse than getting tickets for Taylor Swift.

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#64

Post by maximinus_thrax »

BeefySwain wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what the hell is going on here? Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever, or do websites want you to be able to automate things? Because I don't see how you can have both. If I'm using Selenium it's a problem, but if I'm using Claude it's fine??

> Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever,

Not if they don't want their rankings to tank. Now you'll need to make your website machine friendly while the lords of walled gardens will relentlessly block any sort of 'rogue' automated agent from accessing their services.

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#65

Post by sethops1 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #60
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with XML.

The parent post is a list of failed technologies. Perhaps XML failed for a bad reason, but fail it did. Web MCP will likely fail for the same reasons as the other listed techs.

If you think XML is a failed technology you haven't stepped foot anywhere near a serious enterprise company.

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#66

Post by the_arun »

avaer wrote: post #41
BeefySwain wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what the hell is going on here? Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever, or do websites want you to be able to automate things? Because I don't see how you can have both. If I'm using Selenium it's a problem, but if I'm using Claude it's fine??

In a nutshell: Google wants your websites to be more easily used by the agents they are putting in the browser and other products. They own the user layer and models, and get to decide if your product will be used. Think search monopoly, except your site doesn't even exist as far as users are concerned, it's only used via an agent, and only if Google allows. The work of implementing this is on you. Google is building…

What about Authentication? Should the users to be on Google SSO to use their WebMCP?

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#67

Post by maximinus_thrax »

socalgal2 wrote: post #61
avaer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell: Google wants your websites to be more easily used by the agents they are putting in the browser and other products. They own the user layer and models, and get to decide if your product will be used. Think search monopoly, except your site doesn't even exist as far as users are concerned, it's only used via an agent, and only if Google allows. The work of implementing this is on you. Google is building…

The Google hate virus is thick here. It seems uncontroversial that users will likely want to use AI to find info for them and do things for them. So either Google provides users with what they want or they go out of business to some other company that provides what users want. https://www.perplexity.ai/comet https://chatgpt.com/atlas/ https://arc.net/max That is not in any way to suggest companies are ok to do bad th…

> It seems uncontroversial that users will likely want to use AI to find info for them and do things for them

Lots of weasel words in there. You're doing a lot of work with "seems", "uncontroversial" and "likely". Power users and tech professionals probably want this or their bosses really want this and they fall in line. But a large portion of the 'normal' users still struggle with basic search, distrust AI or just don't trust to delegating tasks to opaque systems they can't inspect. "Users" is not a monolith.

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#68

Post by fasbiner »

BeefySwain wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what the hell is going on here? Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever, or do websites want you to be able to automate things? Because I don't see how you can have both. If I'm using Selenium it's a problem, but if I'm using Claude it's fine??

I can deeply, deeply relate. X and Bluesky are both going nuts with ai and ai scams, but _both_ of them banned an advertising account because we were... using a bot to automate behavior because their APIs are only a subset of functionality.

Their vision is a world where they use all the automation regardless of safety or law, and we have to jump through extra hoops and engage in manual processes with AI that literally doesn't have the tool access to do what we need and will not contact a human.

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#69

Post by the_arun »

the_arun wrote: post #66
avaer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell: Google wants your websites to be more easily used by the agents they are putting in the browser and other products. They own the user layer and models, and get to decide if your product will be used. Think search monopoly, except your site doesn't even exist as far as users are concerned, it's only used via an agent, and only if Google allows. The work of implementing this is on you. Google is building…

What about Authentication? Should the users to be on Google SSO to use their WebMCP?

Here is the answer from Gemini:

> Google's Web Model Context Protocol (WebMCP) handles authentication by inheriting the user's existing browser session and security context. This means that an AI agent using WebMCP operates within the same authentication boundaries (session cookies, SSO, etc.) that apply to a human user, without requiring a separate authentication layer for the agent itself.

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#70

Post by diacritical »

akersten wrote: post #43
cameldrv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too but it died when ads became the currency of the web. If the reason the site exists is to use ads, they’re not going to let you use an user agent that doesn’t display the ads.

> If the reason the site exists is to use ads, they’re not going to let you use an user agent that doesn’t display the ads. They've been giving it the old college try for the better part of two decades and the only website I've had to train myself not to visit is Twitch, whose ads have invaded my sightline one time too many, and I conceded that particular adblocking battle. I don't get the sense that it's high on the…

People who block ads are a minority. Sites that serve heavy content like video would care if someone wastes their resources but blocks ads, but why would a site that serves a few KBs of text spend the resources on blocking such users or making the ads beat the ad blocker in a tiresome cat and mouse game?

Those users could even share or recommend the site to someone else who doesn't use ad blockers, so it actually makes sense to not try to battle ad blockers if you want to make your site more popular.

This makes sense for sites that rely on network effects, like forums or classified ad sites and so on. Unless they have a near monopoly or some really valuable content, they would benefit financially if they let people block their ads.

I can't back that up with data or anything, but it makes sense to me.

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