Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust . What just happened? Google has quietly killed off Project Mariner, one of the first AIs designed to automatically control web browsers to retrieve information, make purchases, and perform other actions – a browser-based AI agent, essentially. But this is unlikely to be considered a failure by the company as many of Mariner's features have been folded into other Google products since its launch. Google first announced Project Mariner back in December 2024 . An extension for an experimental build of Chrome, Mariner could execute multi-step commands to browse websites, use Google search, retrieve specified information, go shopping, and more. Google positioned the agent as assisting with tasks that are usually tedious for humans. Mariner was later updated to handle 10 tasks simultaneously, but it could only be accessed via a $250-per-month Google AI Ultra subscription.…