alt Hacker NewsOvertones designed to stoke outrage aside, this is very much in line with what the original vision of the Web was about. Amazon's tech here is acting as the user agent. (It happens to be that this UA that operates on/with the data that is supplied by some far-off website (the vendor's) is a UA that is itself presented in a web browser and accepts commands that way, and ferries them off the user's local device instead of processing the commands in right there e.g. with a native binary.)
This is a win for user control over how they interact with content on the Web.
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If user agents didn’t exist and were invented today, with the same implementation and use pattern that they currently do, would anyone call them a user agent?
I’m fairly confident that 95%+ of human users on the internet don’t even know what a user agent is, and it’s controlled by parties other than the user.
It’s not a win for user control if only a extremely small niche of users are able to take advantage of it
Crazy take. If you could control the UA I would agree with you, but this "user agent" is totally controlled by Amazon. So it's not a user agent at all - it's in fact an Amazon agent and the inevitable direction here is that Amazon will use this leverage to make itself more money, likely at the expense of the user.
>This is a win for user control
It is reasonable to be very skeptical of Amazon AI to act wholly and transparently in the end user's interest, as was the 'original vision' of a user agent. Frankly, to be otherwise requires a level of naivety that ignores the common thread through Amazon's entire history.