Major technology companies announced significant developments this week, with Google launching an artificial intelligence-powered "Auto Browse" feature for its Chrome browser, Yahoo introducing its new AI answer engine called Scout, and Microsoft committing to fix persistent problems within its Windows 11 operating system. These updates highlight a strong industry push into AI integration and a renewed focus on user experience.
Chrome's New AI Browsing Assistant
Google Chrome is now offering an "Auto Browse" feature, powered by its advanced Gemini 3 AI model. This new tool allows the browser to perform complex, multi-step tasks on behalf of users. Available to AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the United States, Auto Browse can handle online chores such as booking flights, filling out forms, or reordering items from past purchases.[timesofindia+2]
The feature works from a permanent sidebar within Chrome, integrating with other Google services like Gmail, Google Calendar, Maps, and Flights. Users can simply describe a task, and Gemini will navigate websites, click menus, and enter text autonomously. For example, a user could ask Gemini to find an old jacket purchase and reorder it, with the AI logging into the retailer's site, finding the item, and even applying discount codes before pausing for final human approval.[timesofindia+6]
Charmaine D'Silva, a director of product at Google, explained that Auto Browse makes Gemini in Chrome "feel truly agentic."Parisa Tabriz, Google's Vice President of Chrome, stated that testers have used the feature for a wide range of tasks, including scheduling appointments, collecting tax documents, getting quotes for services, and managing subscriptions, saving a "ton of time". The system processes tasks on Google's servers, and page content is logged if activity tracking is enabled. AI Pro subscribers receive 20 daily auto browse tasks, while AI Ultra users get 200.[moneyweb+4]
Yahoo Launches Scout AI Answer Engine
Yahoo debuted its new AI-powered answer engine, Yahoo Scout, this week, making it available in beta across the United States. Scout aims to provide conversational responses and direct answers to user questions, moving beyond traditional search results. The engine is accessible at scout.yahoo.com and is integrated throughout Yahoo's extensive network, including Yahoo News, Finance, Mail, Search, Sports, and Shopping.[searchengineland+8]
Yahoo Scout is powered by Anthropic's Claude AI model, combined with Bing for web grounding, ensuring comprehensive and reliable information. The goal is to offer a "fun, engaging, and easy" user experience for people of all ages. Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo, emphasized that "Search is fundamentally changing, and our team has been inspired to use our decades of experience and extremely rare assets to create something uniquely useful for Yahoo's hundreds of millions of monthly users".[news+4]
Scout can pull rich content directly from Yahoo properties, such as Yahoo Finance widgets, detailed financial data, weather information, and news, presenting it in summaries, tables, and lists with visible source links. This integration aims to streamline daily tasks, offering features like AI summaries in Yahoo Mail, game breakdowns in Yahoo Sports, and key takeaways in Yahoo News. For shoppers, Scout delivers instant research, comparing products and brands, and providing shoppable links. Yahoo Scout leverages data from 500 million user profiles, a knowledge graph of over 1 billion entities, and 18 trillion consumer events annually to provide personalized answers and suggested actions. The beta launch makes Scout available to approximately 250 million U.S. users on both desktop and mobile devices.[searchengineland+9]
Microsoft Addresses Windows 11 Problems
Microsoft is actively working to resolve numerous long-standing issues within Windows 11, with the company reportedly focusing on improving the operating system's core functionality throughout 2026. This initiative, described as "swarming," comes after widespread user complaints about buggy updates and a glitchy user interface.[windowslatest+2]
Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, acknowledged that feedback from Windows Insiders about core issues has been "loud and clear". He stated that Microsoft needs to improve Windows "in ways that are meaningful for people," with a focus on enhancing performance, reliability, and the "overall experience" this year.[tomshardware+1]
Recent Windows 11 updates in January 2026 have caused significant problems for users. The first update of the year led to shutdown issues and crashes in cloud applications like OneDrive and Dropbox, requiring emergency patches. Another January security update, released on the 13th, resulted in boot failures with a "stop code unmountable boot volume," causing some devices to display a black screen and fail to start. Microsoft is currently investigating these boot failures. Other reported issues include desktop icons unexpectedly moving, reversed keyboard character repeat delay labels in settings, and PCs freezing when attempting to run Windows Terminal from a non-admin account. Additionally, some users experienced Explorer.exe hanging upon login with certain startup applications. The January 13 update also caused applications to become unresponsive when saving files to cloud-backed storage, particularly affecting classic Outlook configurations.[windowslatest+11]
These ongoing issues have led to a decline in Microsoft's "More Personal Computing" division, which includes Windows, Surface, and gaming, year-over-year. The company aims to restore trust in Windows, especially as it increasingly integrates AI features like Copilot and other Microsoft services.[windowslatest+1]
