Agentic Browser Wars: Anthropic and Google Enter the Arena - Both in Chrome

In our ongoing tracking of the Agentic Browsers, we put 'Claude for Chrome' and 'Gemini in Chrome' through their Ecommerce paces.

Last week Google announced their entry into the Agentic Browser Wars: Gemini in Chrome and I was granted access to Anthropic’s entry: Claude for Chrome, so it’s a great time to evaluate both of those and share what we’ve found -especially as it relates to Agentic Commerce. Can they dethrone the reigning King of Agentic Browsers - Perplexity’s Comet?

Agentic Browser Release Timeline

We’ve updated our ‘Agentic Browser Timeline’/Tracker to reflect the two new browsers released in August and September. We’re down to only three big players we’d expert to enter the arena: OpenAI/ChatGPT, Meta and Apple. ChatGPT has been rumored for months to be ‘very close’ and as a reminder, they hired several of the OG Google Chrome developers a long time ago. Perhaps it’s coming soon as Sam teased on X Sunday:

If we get both an Agentic browser and ChatGPT Checkout at the same time, the excitement here at Retailgentic maybe too much! 🤯

Why are Agentic Browsers Important and Past Coverage

If you do a thought experiment about what the best possible consumer experience would be to have ‘client’ level access to a user’s browser to see their browsing history, open tabs, be able to login to their accounts (with permission), see their email, etc. Access to these items is all about ‘context’ - the more an LLM knows about the user, the more it can customize the experience, and get to the point of predicting what you want which is the holy grail.

The second and perhaps biggest benefit of being ‘in the browser’ is being able to crawl a site from the client vs. the server. It’s well known that Amazon has chosen to block all agentic crawler traffic to protect their walled garden. This creates a huge problem given that Amazon is 50%+ of all ecommerce. As part of the browser it’s virtually impossible to stop the agent from accessing the site, because you run a high-risk of blocking all your users.

Want to learn more? We’ve covered this topic in more detail as well as other Agentic Browser walk-throughs in previous posts:

• Battle of Agentic browsers Part 1 here.

• Part 2 is here.

• One of our most popular videos is where I took Comet live for a shopping demo and ended up running 4 very complex shopping tasks in parallel (won’t do that again, phew that was intense). here.

Gemini in Chrome

For personal users that have a Gemini account, it appears that all you have to do is update your Chrome to the latest version, have a Gemini account all setup, make sure you’re logged into your personal account and you will see a little ‘Gemini star’ appear in the upper right hand corner or Chrome to signal that the assistant is ready to go. Note: If you’re using a Google corporate account, this hasn’t been rolled out yet and when it is, your administrator will have to turn it on.

Putting Gemini in Chrome through the paces

When you fire up GIC, you get this helpful explainer:

Once you approve, it gives you some tips on what to do. I of course went to my ‘go to’ pretty hard search for any Agentic commerce agent:

(I had the Amazon page open), this is the sidebar/pop-up experience.

Sadly the powers that be have decided they do not want GIC to be able to really do anything→

So unlike all the other Agentic Browsers that can ‘read’ your screen and ‘write’ (at your permission click around and do stuff), GIC is ‘read only’. It can’t even open links! How do I know? Well undeterred, I thought I could outsmart it by starting here→

I then asked it to open chewy and show me - it refused to click the link. Womp womp. You can’t even use it for personal productivity - no excel manipulation, no email sending, no calendar appointment creating.

Score: Comet: 1 / Google in Chrome: 0

Comet - undefeated!

Claude for Chrome

Interestingly, Anthropic took the route of a Chrome extension vs. Perplexity that ‘forked’ the open-source Chromium project and built their own browser. Will this approach put them at a disadvantage? Let’s find out…

Putting CfC through the paces

Similar to Comet, CfC opens up this nicely designed 'hand stitched’ side window to the right of the browser. First there are no shorter than 3 screens acknowledging the risks of using this, that it’s a ‘research preview’ and 'if you want it to ask everytime or run in ‘ask without asking’. As an Agentic enthusiast, I gave Claude nothing but green lights 🚦. Even then with every prompt it says:

“HIGH RISK: No permission checks except sensitive actions. Hidden website instructions can still trick Claude into taking unintended actions. Review risks”.

Phew, none of this gives you warm fuzzies, but Elsie needs her Veggi-dents and I think we’re going to be ok staying on sites like Chewy and Amazon.

In this video I captured a long sequence I put CfC through and it’s really interesting to watch Claude reason through some things. With both Gemini and Claude there was a weird keyboard lag from the interaction of my screencap software and the Agentic Browser that was dropping keys so you’ll have to excuse my painful typing on these videos. I learned to slow down and wait for the character to appear before continuing so it does get better with time.

Claude demo: < 4mins:

Note that even though I have this on ‘don’t ask’ it asks me questions (some valid, some pedantic) every step of the way and I couldn’t get it to press the order button for me. Also after it successfully adds one pack to the cart and then correctly points out I’m under the free ship threshold - I tell it to order another. Interestingly, it can not ‘see’ the cart quantity pop-up (but you can see it right there in the video), I think this is the downside of a Chrome extension, CfC can’t ‘see’ outside the current tab and that pop-up window is outside. Can Claude figure out a work around to this blind-spot? You have to watch to find out!

Score: Comet: 2 / Claude: 0

While Claude was better than Gemini by 3X, CfC still isn’t in the zipcode of Comet. Comet has earned its spot as my daily go-to browser (by Chrome) and I use it hundreds of times a day. It has saved me a minimum of 40 minutes a day and is now in my ‘top 5 productivity hack’ recommendations. Comet’s ecommerce abilities are unparalleled, it cuts through tasks like the Claude simple reorder like a hot agentic knife through productivity butter.

Bonus: Gemini in Chrome Video

I’m putting this in the Bonus category because the keyboard issue was so bad I couldn’t type for the first 20 seconds, so once you suffer through that, you can see Gemini start off pretty well and then it hits a wall when I ask it to every do something. The whole point of ‘Agentic’ is ‘Agency’ - it’s right there in the name Google, come on!