You know what’s a strange coincidence?

This week, both OpenAI and Perplexity announced new web browsers, bold moves that could reshape how we interface with the internet. On the exact same day, Ars Technica published a story about browser extensions quietly turning nearly a million people’s browsers into scraping bots.

And it got me thinking…

Owning the browser is a convenient way to bypass a lot of the safeguards platforms like Cloudflare have put up to stop scraping and bot traffic. Maybe that’s not the intention, but sure is a funny coincidence.

Browser extensions turn nearly 1 million browsers into website-scraping bots

Extensions load unknown sites into invisible Windows. What could go wrong?