Image: OpenAI, via The Verge
Why it mattersA chat window that reads the pages a person already has open changes who writes the comparison, the form fill, and the email, so anyone building a Chrome-based workflow has a new default to design against.
A person comparing three couches across three browser tabs is doing that comparison by hand today. OpenAI said that its ChatGPT Chrome extension can now read the tabs the person already has open, and in ChatGPT Work it can act on them: send messages, fill out forms, download files, and group or organize the tabs. The post came from the @ChatGPT account on X and was covered the same evening by The Verge.
What the extension does now
With the extension installed, a person types @chrome inside the ChatGPT web or desktop app and ChatGPT reads the pages that are open in Chrome. OpenAI's post listed the kinds of question the feature is for: comparing a set of vendor pages across tabs into one sheet with pricing, key features and source links, filling out a form in a Chrome tab from the details of an event brief and stopping before submit, and drafting an email to one of the contractor services the person has been looking at. A short demo video on the @ChatGPT account shows the sofa comparison running from three real tabs.
The sidebar got the whole app
A second post in the same thread said that ChatGPT inside Chrome's sidebar now carries the whole app: the full ChatGPT history, and the choice between Chat and Work from the side of any page. In Work, ChatGPT can control the tabs themselves. The Verge quotes the control list as "sending messages, filling out forms, or downloading files," and says the extension can also organize or group open tabs. That makes ChatGPT the same kind of in-browser agent that Google's Gemini "auto browse" feature already is.
What it does not do yet
The three posts from @ChatGPT describe tab reading and tab control through the extension. OpenAI's own Atlas browser project is over, and the Verge opens its piece by noting that. The product today is the extension, the Chrome Web Store listing is live, and the tab-reading and tab-acting features arrive through an update to that listing rather than a new install.
A chat window that can read the pages a person already has open changes who writes the comparison. A team shipping a Chrome-based tool now has to assume that a visitor's own AI assistant may be reading the page in the next tab and acting on it in this one. For anyone building an agent that watches a browser session, OpenAI is now the default competition for that behaviour on the consumer side, and the Chrome extension is the thing to measure against. For anyone shipping a web product, the forms and comparison tables a user sees are more likely to be read, filled and compared without a human in the middle of it.
Source
ChatGPT (@ChatGPT) on X, first post of the three-post thread. Second post, on the sidebar. Third post, on example queries. ChatGPT Chrome extension on the Chrome Web Store. Reporting: Stevie Bonifield, The Verge, "ChatGPT can peek at your Chrome tabs now".
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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