Amazon Poll Points to Renewed Interest in Desktop Web Browser
big picture: Amazon seems interested in providing its users with a new browser that could improve the company’s business in both the advertising and e-commerce markets. At this point, Amazon has just sent out a seemingly general survey about web browsers to a select number of users.
Amazon may be thinking of a new browser for desktop and laptop users. A recently released survey from a Seattle corporation wants to understand what customers “value in existing web browsers,” which could easily be interpreted as an attempt to learn user preferences to create something new in an already crowded web browser market. .
amazon survey About Web Browser was active until March 19, when the company asked recipients about the PC system they used most frequently (Windows or Mac), the browser they had on said system, the number of hours per day they spent in the browser window, and the number of times they had problems working with tabs.
Amazon also wanted to know what browser activities were most popular across social media, entertainment, productivity, news and (of course) shopping, or whether users had downloaded a third-party browser on their desktop system.
Hmm, is Amazon thinking about building a web browser? I don’t know how else to interpret this. @Dana Mattioli pic.twitter.com/TNwgIa37qT
— Nicholas De Leon (@nicholasadeleon) March 13, 2023
In the most revealing part of the survey, users were asked to rate the importance (on a scale of 1 to 5, like a five-star voting system in Amazon’s own product reviews) of advanced features such as third-party cookie blocking, password suggestions and controls, advanced privacy options such as VPN and “built-in ad blocker”, text-to-speech, add-ons, tab organization and data synchronization between desktop and mobile devices.
At the end of the survey, Amazon asked users to “imagine a new desktop/laptop browser is available” and rate which feature would convince them to download such a new browser amid faster load times, “stronger” security and privacy. features, AI-related features, add-on support, etc.
If the survey leads to a real product, this would be Amazon’s second entry into the browser market after Chromium-based Amazon Silk. Rather than being limited to Kindle, Fire, and Echo Show devices, the new browser will have to compete for market share with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and many other third-party browsers available on PC today.
Amazon’s renewed interest in the browser market could have several explanations, given that the company is essentially drowning in a wealth of valuable data about user habits and shopping habits. Amazon may be interested in experimenting with new ways to profile and track users now that Chrome is about to phase out its third-party cookie mechanism, or even decide to further expand its involvement in the ad business after generating $38 billion in revenue in 2022. one.
