<a href="https://archive.ph/vhTfm" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/vhTfm</a>
If Chrome has the <i>#optimization-guide-on-device-model</i> and <i>#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano</i> flags enabled, either because it's part of some Origin Trial / Early Stable Release or something, then web pages will have access to the new Prompt API which allows any webpage to initiate the (one-time) download of the ~2.7 GiB CPU or ~4.0 GiB GPU model using LanguageModel.create()<p><a href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api" rel="nofollow">https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api</a><p>When Chrome 148 releases tomorrow, this will be the default behaviour on desktop.<p>To download, it should check for 22 GiB free disk space on the volume where your Chrome data dir is, and at least double the model size of free space in your tmp dir.
First the tabs came for the RAM and i did not protest, for i had plenty.
Then they came for the chip and i did not protest, for it was dark silcon anyway.
Then they came for the HDD.
The more severe problem is that Google installs model weight files on a per-user basis, meaning Chrome occupies 4 more GB of space for <i>every OS user</i> on your device.
The company I work at has several environments and hundreds of VDI users in each environment. Chrome is the default browser in all of them. By my rough napkin math, this one small change by Google will eat up at least 15 terabytes of new disk space in total. (I sure hope we are using deduplication at the physical storage layer...)
You can already trigger a 2 GB model download with the Summarizer API[0], which is already shipped in Chrome.<p><pre><code> Summarizer.create()
</code></pre>
[0]: <a href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/summarizer-api#model-download" rel="nofollow">https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/summarizer-api#model-do...</a><p>I think this is a distinct model from the Prompt API, since the other shipped AI APIs use fine tuned models.
It is a small model, so what utility can I / Google expect from it? What is the on-board model used for?
It's not a very good small model to be honest.<p>That said, you might be surprised to learn that some of the models from 3b-9b could probably replace 80% of the things nonvibe coders use chatgpt for.<p>Its a good idea to run small models locally if your computer can host them for privacy and cash saving reasons. But how can you trust Google to autoinstall one on your machine in 2026? I just couldn't do it.
Sure, local models good and yes, there's no way we can trust Google.<p>We can be positive the entire motivation of Chrome is user behavior surveillance. There's not a nano-chance in all the multiverses that Chrome model is doing anything privately. They've gone to extraordinary length to accomplish this. It's not for free.
It is entirely about user surveillance as well as pushing their <i>product</i> on to their users because they have the install base. Google Chrome has become Microsoft IE6 in hostile user behavior.
Isn’t it really “pushing a feature to their products”?
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.<p>What did we expect when they dropped "don't be evil" from their company values?
A claim about as useful then as it is now. They never wanted to be anything but, once Sergei left. The Schmidt era had them publicly declare one thing while doing something else entirely behind the curtain.
They were corporate evil from day 1. The rest was just PR slogans, and playing the good guy as long as you don't need to squeeze profits.
I don't trust them either, but the same Google makes Gemma 4 available to run as locally and privately as you want, and those models are pretty amazing for their size.
> But how can you trust Google to autoinstall one on your machine<p>Why are AI models something I'd be uniquely unable to trust Google to install, compared all the other code included in Chrome updates? Is your point just that you shouldn't trust Chrome in general?
Yeah, so unclear why yer again everyone is so quickly running for the pitchforks & torches. The model doesn't <i>do</i> anything, it's just a sandbox.<p>I'm really tired of such overinflated ridiculousness shrillness against Google. Yes there are very real tensions to this company and their as business is scary as heck.<p>But folks don't seem capable of processing <i>duality,</i> don't seem to be able to do much but ad-hominem until they pass out. Its really so exhausting having such empty energy charging in every single time, and it keeps obstructing any ability to think straight or assess.
All that matters is some MBA product manager at Google was celebrated for shipping this. Hooray!
Half of the reason to use local AI is to circumvent the censorship that Google, OpenAI and so on have. I don't want this Google crap on my computer.
Which is why I uninstalled Chrome a (short...) while ago and my life went on unbothered.
It's based on Gemma 3n, and it's not the best.<p>I find it works fine for simple classification, translation, interpretation of images & audio. It can write longer prose, but it's pretty bad.<p>It can also write text in the format of a JSON schema or regexp for anything you might want to do with structured data.
I find models of this size (not tested this one specifically) at being very good at simple data extraction from user input. Think about things like parsing date and time of an event from a description or parsing a human-typed description of a repeating event rule.
> It is a small model, so what utility can I / Google expect from it?<p>Precedence for shipping models alongside consumer software.<p>Potentially without consent if it truly is a silent install.
I ran a fairly large production test of this and on _every_ measure except for privacy it was worse than a free tier server hosted LLM.<p>Not happy about that as I would like to see more local models but that's the current state of things.<p><a href="https://sendcheckit.com/blog/ai-powered-subject-line-alternatives" rel="nofollow">https://sendcheckit.com/blog/ai-powered-subject-line-alterna...</a>
Those two (and more) exist in chrome://flags in Chrome 147. I'm disabling them now, with the expectation that will prevent the new default.<p>One option I'm leaving as default is "Use LiteRT-LM runtime for on-device model service inference." Any comment on that?
I'm on Chrome 147 too and disabled:<p>"optimization-guide-on-device-model"<p>- Enables optimization guide on device<p>"prompt-api-for-gemini-nano"<p>- Prompt API for Gemini Nano<p>- Prompt API for Gemini Nano with Multimodal Input<p>and deleted weights.bin and the 2025.x folder in "OptGuideOnDeviceModel"<p>Will report if Chrome 148 downloads the model again.
maybe I was on the wrong side of the early release but I’ve deleted this model many times in the last year. I’ve had it for at least 12 months.
If you touch those files into existence and chown to root and chmod to 0, it shouldn’t be able to ever overwrite them right?
I'm on my phone now so I can't check if something has changed, but what you want to protect from change is the directory, not the files. A file can be deleted and created again if the process can write the directory.
yeah, should work. Will try readonly on windows too.<p>Now I can't see it anymore, but shouldn't the model be under chrome://on-device-internals/ -> model-status?<p>Maybe you can uninstall there too.
thanks, went to flags in Vivaldi and just in case disabled all flags containing "gemini" and first five results for "model"
Those flags will exist already, but will default to enabled in 148.<p>That other flag is for using a different open-source inference engine to the (from what I can tell) closed-source one that's used by default.
[dead]
"Silently installs" is misleading. They are including a file in the package which is presumably related to the functionality of the software. I don't use chrome for a long list of reasons but it is not standard or expected to get consent for that.
There is, however, precedent for software alerting/asking the user to install “extras” or utility packs and showing the disk size that content will take up and even allowing the user to choose a location to store such things. Creative software does this all the time.<p>There’s nothing stopping Google Chrome from doing something similar except, I suspect, Google knows or feels it will result in many fewer installs of its bloatware.
[flagged]
Rage bait? It's a fact about how some software handles downloading extra content. This issue and how ads on the web are served are two separate issues.
I doubt many people here download any ads in a day.
“Silent” seems appropriate given it historically never required such a large storage requirement and the nature of the <i>new</i> feature seems entirely optional; and it’s happening silently as part of a normal upgrade.
> it's happening silently as part of a normal upgrade.<p>No, this is not true. The large requirement comes after a user wants to use the feature, not as a part of the normal upgrade. If the user never engages with the feature, it's not downloaded.
According to above, it is triggered by the website calling the feature. The user might have no idea. That's not what consent looks like
That's even more silent.
> No, this is not true. The large requirement comes after a user wants to use the feature,<p>The feature that <i>didn't</i> say it would cost you 4Gb, right?
Are you okay with a 1 GB chrome install suddenly becoming a 5 GB chrome install on all your machines, without your permission or knowledge, for functionality you may or may not want?
Look at how many headlines indicated that something is silently happening. It's a weird trend at the moment.
We live in a tech world where it has become normalized that perfectly functioning software that you used to buy once and then got to use indefinitely suddenly receives an "update" to put previously existing functionality behind a pain subscription. The reasonable expectation people have is that an update fixes security bugs and maybe includes a few optimizations.<p>So no, I don't think it's a weird trend at all that people start describing software as "silently" doing things when trust in automatic updates of software (a thing that software silently does) has deservedly gone down the drain in the last few years.
No weird: accurate. It IS a silent install.<p>I wanted a browser, not an LLM.
If it gets the clicks it sticks.
Then what is your definition of "installing" exactly? Are you going to split hairs about it not being a separate program being installed and running in the background, but weights being used by code that is run inside the browser? Because honestly, I don't think there's any significant difference from the user's perspective here. Other than the fact that doing the latter bypasses the need to get permission to install a new program. Which makes it an even worse violation, in a way, since it undermines the trust that the browser as a platform is just a browser.<p>A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a <i>web browser</i>. It is something forced on users without their consent.<p>Of course that's what we get for giving the benefit of doubt to the company that insisted on learning the wrong things from the Google Buzz fiasco.
Install does convey something more involved than including a file, that's not splitting hairs. It is not uncommon for software to include malware that runs independently of the software you expected, and the headline is clickbait that taps into those concerns. I'm here for the concerns about bloat. "Downloads" would have been the right term to use but it doesn't sound as scary.
> A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a web browser. It is something forced on users without their consent.<p>This does not happen. The model is not downloaded unless the user intentionally uses the feature that requires it. Then it's downloaded at that point.
untrue, I’ve deleted it many times in the last year. I don’t think this is new.
Unless the user uses a feature.<p>That that feature (a) requires a local LLM, (b) will install a multi-GB download without telling the user, all happen without any explicit user consent.
> "Silently installs" is misleading. They are including a file in the package which is presumably related to the functionality of the software.<p>Related... to the functionality of feeding the same profit and loss account, right?
This feels deliberately reductive
> Energy intensity of network data transfer: 0.06 kWh per GB, the mid-band of Pärssinen et al. (2018) "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising", Science of The Total Environment [14]. The paper reports a 0.04-0.10 kWh/GB range depending on the share of fixed-line vs mobile transfer and inclusion of end-user device energy. 0.06 is a defensible mid-point.<p>2018? An estimate from 8 years ago is going to be off by a factor of 10 or so.<p>Not sure you'd get far with the legal arguments unless you're actually a lawyer. Too easy to misunderstand the jargon (i.e. the same reason why it's dangerous to use an LLM as your lawyer).<p>(As an aside, the whole thing reads to me like the style LLMs use; not saying for sure it was, just giving me those vibes).
0.04 to 0.1 kWh/GB is insane even for 2018 lol.<p>I have gigabit internet (125 MB/s). This would imply when I'm downloading something I'm using 18 to 45 kW of electricity. Completely bonkers.
You think the energy cost to transfer has dropped by 10 X in eight years? Why?
Seems reasonable to believe to me. The cost of a transfer is presumably calculated based on the base power cost of the transfer machinery, since I really doubt that a router or switch's power usage is linear with the amount of data it's transferring. The amount that an industrial router or switch (which is what 80-90% of the hops between you and Google are) has to have increased its bandwidth by around 10x over that time, and I doubt they have 10x'd their energy usage.
Long term historical trend, lots of small tech improvements that add up, like all other tech. Some of it's how antennas are higher gain, which puts more of the energy in the path from one end of a line to the other and wasting less (affecting both cellular and WiFi standards over this period), some is improved compute reducing the cost of routing, but as with the improvements to chips and batteries and PV, the list of things is long and each one only contributes part of it.<p>EDIT: got the maths very wrong with some other estimates, deleted them.
Agreed. Also, complaining about the climate impact of an AI model download while opening your post with an ai generated image is peak hypocrisy. Did not bother to read the rest.
How hard would have been to add a simple message, warning people about it and offering to opt out? Most would have clicked OK without reading anyway, and Google could pretend they give a shit about users. Unless they expected blowback, and that kind of message is the "compromise" they want to eventually land on.
They don't want you to opt out. Then they can't brag to the shareholders about Chrome being "AI Powered"<p>You're not even the customer when it comes to Google.
Don't forget the metric saying "99.97% of user have installed this" even though less than 1% of users know it exists, much less use it
at this point you're barely the product either. You're more a passive platform for them to execute their strategy on.
I was not happy when they added Gemini to the top bar, in its own place that nothing else gets to use.
I think a local AI model is appreciated, but it being bundled and executed through Chrome, I expect that more or less all data get exfiltrated by Google.<p>They simply read your mails, how would you expect there to be anything resembling decency in a company like that? It is the ad business.<p>Bad thing is that people still use gmail.
Presumably they think the fraction of their userbase who cares about this would be too small to justify the expense of adding a warning message. The mere existence of a warning message implies that there is something to be worried or concerned, about, a position they probably do not endorse or accept.
Because we must get what the tech overlords want us to get, not what we want to get.
Not on my devices. Auto update has been abused so often now that it is an embarrassment to the industry. Auto update should be for bug fixes and security issues only.
Auto update is basically a root backdoor, it's especially troublesome when you are not the customer, you are the product!
I'm on an Arch flavor, so its whenever I feel like updating. I try to update frequently enough, but if i wait weeks or months, nothing breaks, it always just works, and I get the latest of everything.
This is exactly how it works on Debian. Can recommend.
There is a difference between<p>- software company decides to release a new version and auto installs it for everyone who has the old version (like Google Chrome)<p>- software company decides to release a new version. The Debian packaage maintainer checks if the update is fine, is compatible with Debian policies, then includes it in the packages repositories.<p>In the first, there are no checks. In the second, there are.
Guess what runs my PC. Tech companies just don't understand consent.
It is almost the standard:<p><pre><code> Q: Does <company> understand consent?
A: No / Maybe Later
</code></pre>
but the Google version is:<p><pre><code> Q: Does <company> understand consent?
A: No / Maybe Later / we did it anyway, you'll need to search to find out how to turn it off, maybe ask the new AI model we've just back-door installed?</code></pre>
I think they do. They just don’t care. We’re the fleetingly small percentage of nerds in the corner who will notice and complain. Were useful to them for other reasons but we’re not really the concern here.<p>It’s probably a business misplay to tell the other 99% of users about something they weren’t going to think about. But if by chance it goes awry and there’s outcry, just apologize and commit to do better.
> ... don't understand consent.<p>The word you're looking for is "respect". They <i>understand</i> consent, the same as JBS* <i>understands</i> animal rights.<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_N.V" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_N.V</a>.
Do you understand consent?<p>1. Yes<p>2. Ask me later
Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?
I have no idea but when I mention Firefox my colleagues under 35 or so literally think I'm joking.
When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech.<p>When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet, with entire forums filled with people vowing to leave Firefox forever and switching to something like Waterfor or Ilp/Zorp/Floop instead.<p>As a result, searching for experiences other people had with Firefox makes it sound like hell on earth, while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
Mozilla is nice enough to let you opt out.<p>I'm in my 40s I have no desire for this new technology unless we get the kind of AI from Japanese anime.
Offering something like a local Gemma 4 (though apparently not what we get here) to web apps via a browser API could change UX quite drastically. Possibly for the better. We had a project where it could have been nice.
> "RMS style curl works for me unless I can have Hatsune Miku"
I, being a Firefox user with practically zero Chromium use, would air my grievances when the Mozilla does something I disagree with more than I would when Google does. And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.<p>You wouldn’t throw the same fit if [insert dictator you don’t have high expectations of here] shot a hundred random civilians compared to if your government did, no?
> would air my grievances when the Mozilla does something I disagree with more than I would when Google does.<p>Mozilla doesn't care about your grievances. It collects lots of telemetry about you by default, and has recently officially removed the obligation not to sell your personal data to third parties etc. It also plans to "introduce AI" into its browser.<p>> And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.<p>On the contrary. Those people have moved on, or are in the process of moving on, from Firefox itself to more privacy-minded forks. Like Palemoon, LibreWolf and maybe Mullvard.
> When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech.<p>Because this is something expected from Google. Google has never committed to security, but Mozilla did.<p>EDIT: I meant privacy, not security.
Google has invested significantly in security. I believe you are referring to privacy?
This is a significant point. To many people security includes privacy, which is a fair assumption: in a non-evil timeline user privacy will be one of the first-class components high on the priority list for being secured. Unfortunately companies and the people high up running them only care about their own privacy¹, everyone else is expected to be <i>grateful</i> that we are being stalked so we can be targetted for sales purposes.<p>--------<p>[1] Follow one of them around the way they track us online, or let out a bit of information about, for example, their tax affairs, and see how fast lawyers or law enforcement arrive on your doorstep…
Having rock-solid security for quietly transferring all of your deeply personal and private data to Google feels like a win for the pedants, but a loss for everyone else.
Oh, you right, thanks for pointing this out. Indeed, I referred to privacy.
Google has invested massively into security. On various platforms (non-Chromium Linux excluded), Google Chrome uses advanced defence-in-depth that make Chrome much more secure than Firefox on the same machine. Their origin-based process separation make Chrome a memory hog but protect tab processes from each other in a way Firefox doesn't bother with just yet.<p>Chrome may be a privacy nightmare, but in terms of security it beats Mozilla.
Same could be said about Windows vs Linux back in the day, but as another person already pointed out it doesn't make sense when the owner is one of the ones you are trying to protect yourself against.<p>Also, as it turned out, Windows wasn't much more secure than Linux, and I guess we'll find this with Chrome as well. In fact I wonder if this isn't obvious already now that uBlock Origin doesn't work on Chrome any longer?<p>Besides, isn't Chrome approaching 20 years now and I still cannot have tree style tabs on it so it is still a toy browser meant for causual browsing, not work ;-)
Defense is not very meaningful if your browser is provided by one of the parties you need to defend yourself yourself _against_.
They've been consuming 15+ years of anti-Mozilla rants anytime it or Firefox are mentioned online.<p>It's how you get things like "Browser monocultures are an issue, so don't use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!" said in earnest.
Or simply they haven't heard much about it at all, don't care, and chalk it up to OP being some sort of an odd hipster.<p>Man, so many things could be better if people cared.
its almost like Google, a marketing company with a serious requirement for data mining, could be talking shit about Mozilla...
If Mozilla fired its CEO for a private political donation from 10 years earlier, it will not hesitate to do much worse to its users. Mozilla isn’t on the good side here.<p>He’s the founder of Brave, by the way.
<p><pre><code> He’s the founder of Brave, by the way.
</code></pre>
You mean that Chrome browser re-skin that mines crypto without your consent?<p><pre><code> a private political donation from 10 years earlier
</code></pre>
Yeah, he was only a bigot 10 years ago! I'm sure it's changed now.
I’ve been using Firefox for 20+ years and continue to do so, but let’s not pretend that Firefox hasn’t been an embarrassing shit show for most of the past 15.
10x better than safari and it won’t consume all my RAM like google, so not sure it you’re just repeating what you heard or if you mean what you said
I’ve been a Safari user for over 20 years. Every year or so I go on a journey to switch to something else. I’ve use Firefox (LibreWolf, IceWeasle, etc), Chrome (Edge, Arc, etc), Camino, OmniWeb, Orion, Opera (I was primarily an Opera user before Safari), and more. At work I use Edge for weird corporate reasons that I’m not thrilled about.<p>I always end up coming back to Safari for personal use. It seems to do the best job getting out of my way. I am annoyed by how Safari now handles browser extensions. I’d like them to take a page out of Orion’s book and support both Firefox and Chrome extensions. However, I generally have very few extensions, as they tend to slow things down, so this has been a relatively minor issue. The main things I’ve wanted extensions for in other browsers (like word lookup) have come out of the box in Safari (or Apple platforms as a whole) for quite a long time.
> 10x better than safari and it won’t consume all my RAM like google<p>Using the 3 regularly, no, Firefox is not "10 times better than Safari". Though, yes, Chrome(ium) is a ressource hog.
I'd recommend checking out WaterFox. It's what I switched to when I finally got sick & tired of Mozilla's shit.
i really feel like trying this out as a quasi-firefox user, but i've really started to love and appreciate Zen for its UI :( wonder if there's a Waterfox X Zen alternative.<p>EDIT: whoops, should've scrolled down a bit on the website, looks like Waterfox has vertical tabs as well. damn, probably going to try to migrate to it sometime soon...<p>EDIT2: of course supports firefox extensions as well, perfect.
People keep saying this like it's just conventional wisdom we all supposedly agree with. I think it's a string of tech articles and spiraling comment sections searching for drama that's kind of been a self-perpetuating phenomenon over the past 3 or 4 years the majority of which I think has been extremely unfair and mostly just based on vibes. If you actually scroll through HN and read the criticisms, they tend to trail off into vague phrases like "all the stuff they've been doing".<p>If people read the release notes instead of the comment sections, not only would they have a lot more specific knowledge of the work going into the browser but they wouldn't be locked in this cycle of outrage and escalation that normally you only see in YouTube comment sections.
Ok, then. What shitshow? Does it not pale in comparison to Chrome and Edge?
The more time goes on the more I feel like I live on a different planet. Even things like "shouldn't you be able to decide what software you run on the stuff you own?" gets blank stares.
I mean ... frankly, and I say this as a guy who's used solely Firefox since before it was Firefox all the way until 2025 when I finally got sick & tired of their shit... (now on WaterFox because I refuse to submit to the Google browser monopoly)<p>... Mozilla absolutely did this to themselves. Come think of it, they really remind me of what Microsift's been doing with Windows.
I still don't understand what problem you guys have with Firefox. I really don't, and comments like yours are always very vague and seem to assume that it's obvious.<p>For me Firefox is (slightly) better than is used to be, not by a wide margin but it's not gotten worse either.<p>I've been running it since it was Phoenix so I think my experience is at least somewhat valid, which is why I'm so confused by these comments.
Are you referring to technical implementation or the poor anti-privacy decisions they keep making when you say 'slightly better'? I have not given up, but I am profoundly disappointed and for somebody who says they have used FF for so long, it feels like I am being gaslit when you say they are peachy.<p>People have problems with what they choose to program, not the quality of their code. I too have used FF since the beginning, but switched to Waterfox last year (it took me about two years to make that decision - I didn't make it lightly). I chose WF in large part because its profile remains compatible with FF so I can switch back if they calm the F down and start acting normal again for long enough to rebuild some trust.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mozilla_Corporation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mozilla_Corporati...</a> - start at the end for most recent.<p>Also go to the website of any one of the FF forks and read their reasons for existing. For example:<p><a href="https://www.waterfox.com/#why-waterfox" rel="nofollow">https://www.waterfox.com/#why-waterfox</a>
You’re not alone. Been a user for years and I still don’t get the hate.<p>Having said that, I keep a copy of Ungoogled Chromium for those websites that refuse to test against FF.
Could you list some of the major grievances you have with Firefox? I haven't been following the news very closely
Is Vivaldi any good?
> Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?<p>There are only three major browser rendering engines. One is Gecko, by Mozilla. One is Webkit, currently tended to by Apple. And one is Blink, which is Google/Microsoft. Of those, Blink is the most featureful. That's why.
What browsers would you recommend? I use Brave but it's still Chromium under the hood. It's the only one that I never had trouble with adblock though. Also lets me play youtube on mobile when my screen is locked.
Vivaldi - built in ad blocker, the creator is a nice guy, transparent business model. It might be rough around the edges, but it's much better from every alternative imho.
Firefox.
Brave origin on linux looks pretty solid now. Now I'm using that and Librewolf.
I will never use Brave after the debacle where they injected content into sites downloaded over HTTPS to pretend people were promoting their crypto token and adding a "donate" button on the page.
I just checked it out, but it removes Tor access? It would pretty much downgrade the regular browser
Brave it's spyware, keep going with Librewolf. You can disable some fingerprinting support for WebGL -but- you need UBo for sure (and JShelter).
I still use Firefox. It does all I need with no ads. That's nice.
Currently using Helium.
I agree. This is Google doing underhanded Google-things. Why the hell would anyone trust them in the first place?
Exactly my thoughts. There are so many good alternatives already, it's insane to me that people still use this garbage. LibreWolf is a godsend
Easy. You work for a company that has only whitelisted chrome or edge.
I use Chrome because at Google Meet it renders a nice separate window with mute/unmute controls as you switch to another tab and screen share.<p>Curious if Google plans to allow other browsers doing that too.
You could use Chromium just for Google Meet. That's what I do. I have Chromium relatively up to date that I basically solely use when I need to. It can be Google Meet, or Teams, or whatever was purposely botched in order NOT to work with Firefox, basically sabotage, but it can also be very rare cases like Lego Spike or GrapheneOS Web installer which require WebUSB.<p>99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.
Why in the world do people keep shipping Chrome with their pseudo native applications?
i use chrome enterprise for my personal use, which is managed via the google workspace admin.<p>you would think google is not stupid enough to mess with gcp account holders
It's the browser that annoys me the least. Almost everything just works.
What are the alternatives? Only a massively moneyed corp has the resources to fight vulns at acceptable rates. Firefox doesn’t count because they’re being funded by Google.
I don't understand this perspective. How can one accept the objectively more user hostile option because the less hostile one gets money from the other. If one objects to using products funded by google, why is there not also an objection to using products from google?<p>For as long as the funding for Firefox continues, it remains a viable option. And despite all their bad decisions of late, they still give users the ability to configure or disable user hostile components.<p>Their funding model is a risk, but I've been using Firefox and librewolf forever and I'd argue it's a much better option than chrome or edge, especially with a handful of plugins. A risk is still better than the actual realization of the risk.
> Firefox doesn’t count because they’re being funded by Google.<p>Even if that were true, it's still a better option _today_.
In the short term, Helium (if, like me, you can’t live without Chrome’s bookmarks). In the medium term, perhaps Ladybird. In the long term, we’re all dead.
I think they were looking for browsers that aren't based on Chromium or Gecko, which, for something still regularly updated and works with most websites, I think webkit is the only real alternative.
Anything webkit-based and open source like Epiphany or Konqueror/Rekonq, it matches your "moneyed corp" requirement (Apple).
Because ladybird isn’t alpha yet, and Firefox is a mess.
What mess? I only ever used Chrome as my main browser for a short while when Firefox had become rather bloaty and had slow JS, and Chrome was small and nimble. But that was something like fifteen years ago. Firefox works, is plenty fast these days, and only eats most of my RAM compared to Chrome which takes all of it, and serves me a web devoid of almost all ads and most trackers.
Firefox has a complete UBo unlike the Chrom* corporateware turd which is just Microsoft 2.0 from Google. Chrome instead of IE, and propietary JS code for Google services such as Youtube -deliberately made slower in Firefox- as the new Active X shoved down your throat in order to keep a monopoly.<p>With Librewolf I can get proper WebGL, full UBo -with the AI blocklist too to avoid all the slop- and Bypass Paywall Clean from Giflic or whatever was called. Yeah, eh, y local newspaper won't mainly get adverts' money but the rest of local company ads show up well even with UBo/BPC, so they get some money after all.<p>On RAM usage, Librewolf it's far lighter on the long term and it doesn't ping back as Firefox, and many times less than Chrom* based browsers where, I repeat, Chrome based browsers don't allow UBo any more even if installed from their Github repo enforcing some about:flags variables related to legacy extension support.<p>The web today without UBo it's unmanageable. Popus, more than the ones from 2003, malware disguised as ads even on mainstream, safe sites, and all of these running zillions of cookies and trackers converting your -otherwise perfectly usable- old amd64 Celeron machine with 2GB of RAM into some crawling Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. With LibreWolf and UBo I could even test Yandex Maps with Prypiat and the like and InstantStreetView too. No slowdowns, no OpenGL >= 3.3/Vulkan video card required, and no need to own a 8GB machine.<p>HN developers there without UBo if they depend on the web for documentation they are bit screwed if they use Chrom* based browsers, sorry. Half of the resources for their machines coudn't be used, you know for IDE's, compilers, virtual machines/containers and whatnot.
And, yes, I know about ZRAM under GNU/Linux, and just imagine how many tasks would anyone accomplish with a ZRAM compressed chunk (~1/3 of the physical RAM), a light desktop environment as Lumina/LXQT and a non-Chrom* browser blocking all pests. Up to 3X more tasks in the same machine. No need to waste money on upgrades, and compilng cycles are cut down for the good.
Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.
Your word might be of petabytes of traffic. Some people have slow lines. Some people have metered Internet subscriptions.<p>Not everyone has access to the same infrastructure you have.
Or just tethering abroad with an esim data plan...
Just opening chrome would deplete your quota and leave you stranded.
Google you are sick!
Yeah I have to run ski race software with slow and intermittent internet. It is things like this that can wreck the race and bankrupt the small club if we have to refund entry fees to an entire field. It really is brutal and real. Looking at you windows update and now Google and Chrome.
yeah 3 bucks a gig here for quite a while, finally got a kinda sorta unlimited connection recently. I scripted up a meter of sorts to watch my traffic and its amazing how much is just trash. video advertising of any sort is awful. there were many sites that if I just forgot about them in the browser window they would happily reload periodically and trash my days budget lol, then using "links" for just reading really shows off how many websites just reject you for not having javascript.<p>now I'm working on upgrading my computer lol
It's somewhat known that Chrome isn't catering to those users. They aim to deliver feature-rich experiences rather than be the de-facto browser for resource-constrained devices.
Okay, but that's still not an environmental disaster.
I do not agree: I live by the sea and this is exactly the answer I get when I talk about trash in the sea. I personally appreciate even more that kind of "stretch" then the privacy one (which could be another "stretch" on getting closer to 1984 scenario)
I guess you can write an article about every new gigabyte released, and we can use more gigabytes talking about it, but other than that I don't see that any one gigabyte of software I don't want is especially more noteworthy than any other gigabyte of software I don't want.<p>An xBox game can be 50+ gigs. Millions of gamers. Fire up the presses!<p>I'm not at all saying nothing matters so we shouldn't care. I just disagree about the utility of calling out specific things out of proportion to their place in the climate crisis. Tackle AI, yes, and fast fashion and cars, and ... that one change to Chrome? I guess if that's where you want to put your energy, Sisyphus.
<p><pre><code> I don't see that any one gigabyte of software I don't want is especially more
noteworthy than any other gigabyte of software I don't want.
</code></pre>
I feel like you're being intentionally naive here. There's a difference between a forum using up a gig here or there, and one of the biggest software makers in the world shipping 4GB to <i>all of its millions of users</i> (if not <i>billions</i> at this point).
> An xBox game can be 50+ gigs.<p>In my experience a game worth playing never exceeded 1 (one) gig in size.<p>It is only incompetent creators that feel the need to bury their incompetence under gigabytes of irrelevance.
Chrome is used by about 3.8 billion people [1]. So, if this is rolled out to every chrome user over the next year or two, this would generate about 15 Exabytes of traffic. It's difficult to find accurate, useful numbers on this, but lets assume 29 grams of CO2e per GB, this would be about 450k tons of CO2e. This in turn, equates to average household CO2 expenditure of almost 300k households.<p>So make your own judgement, but this seem pretty significant to me.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/global-chrome-user-base/" rel="nofollow">https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/global-chrome-user-base/</a>
[2]: <a href="https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines" rel="nofollow">https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str...</a>
[3]: <a href="https://www.anthesisgroup.com/insights/what-exactly-is-1-tonne-of-co2/" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthesisgroup.com/insights/what-exactly-is-1-ton...</a>
This is about the same as each of those people streaming a movie to their TV. There's no there there.
> but lets assume 29 grams of CO2e per GB<p>29 grams for something that takes most folks less than 20 seconds to download? How many watts (neglecting the machinery was going to be running regardless of whether you are transferring something!) do you think it takes to transfer data?<p><a href="https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11</a><p>Coal, the absolute worst of all, represents 18 grams over 60 full seconds to produce 1000 watts of power.
Most folks have >400Mbps connections now (ignoring frame overhead, unsaturated pipes, TCP window size scaling time, etc.)? That’s amazing news.
Traffic is not homogeneous in total transfer cost. CDN-hosted data at the edge, close to the user is much cheaper than data that has to transit many hops. At the asymptote, transferring data between machines on the LAN is essentially free.
Yes and this is just the first version of this model. As if there won't be an update (complete replacement) of the model every few months.
Other comparisons:<p>About equal to a major iOS update at 8 GB x 1.5B.<p>Netflix and YouTube together are perhaps around 200EB/month.
What is a lot of traffic to you?<p>2.5 million downloads of 4 GB are 10 PB of traffic.<p>I think there are be a lot more than 2.5 million Chrome users in the world.
You only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.
I never intentionally used any AI features in Chrome but first was made aware of the models when my disk was running out of space. I investigated with a disk usage tool and found I had multiple versions of the model in my Chrome directory taking up ~12gb. This was about half a year ago and maybe I was in a bad experiment or something but it's definitely not opt in or user visible. Less tech savvy people will have a really hard time understanding why their disk space is running low.
> You only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.<p>i certainly never activated it willfully. i use Chrome only as a fallback testing platform for web dev - a handful of times per month - yet both Chrome Stable and Chrome Unstable had installed this 4GB monstrosity in my home dir. 8GB of junk i'd never used. Both have since been uninstalled and replaced with Chromium.
Do you think this will not be part of some google product? On top of their normal agenda, this seems perfectly suited for them to push their AI models. So if you use anything from Google via Chrome, I would expect that this will end up on your device sooner or later.
You estimate more or less than 2.5 million?<p>If you google OptGuideOnDeviceModel, there’s already a lot of results of people asking what it is an how they can delete them. It’s not some kind of obscure niche feature.<p>I wonder when the first crypto miner-like malware appears that offloads model usage to the client computers.
I suspect it's not that simple. Last week I noticed I already had it downloaded on one of my devices, even though I'm sure the number of websites already using this API is miniscule.
More data moves in your average playstation system update than that. Steam probably transmits more in a morning than that
There are <i>far</i> more Google Chrome users than probably PlayStation & Steam users combined.<p>Also, someone installing Steam is going to expect large downloads, hell, the platform tells you the size as you're about to start the download.<p>I don't think anyone expects a browser to suddenly download 4GB, <i>let alone behind their backs</i>!
Wikipedia say 3.6 billion Chrome users.
Amazing how many people missed the "environmental disaster" part of this post and are talking about personal inconvenience.<p>Sorry folks, your low bandwidth situation is not, in fact, a climate change emergency.
Whilst I am sceptical about Google in this space I do think it is a move in the right direction to do more locally and actually use the space modern machines have on device.
The same old individualistic fallacy [1] of highlighting individual effects to hide global effects, all while compromising user privacy. In reality this will be continuous million of devices downloading these useless weight files.<p>[1] Used since forever by the Tobacco & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.
60.000.000 kg ÷ 1.000.000.000 user<p>is about 60 gramms of co2 per user?
There are <i>multiple</i> problems here.<p>For one, not everyone in this world lives on high bandwidth unmetered connections. In Germany, you got <i>a lot</i> of people still running on 16 MBit/s ADSL, that's half an hour worth of full load just for AI garbage. With the average 50 MBit/s, it's still 10 minutes. For those running on hotspots - be it their phone with often enough 10 GB or less on your average data plan or train hotspots that cut you off after 200MB - the situation is similarly dire.<p>The other thing is storage. I got a nominally 256GB MacBook Air. Of these 256 GB, easily 50GB are already gone for macOS itself, swap, Recovery and everything that macOS doesn't store as part of the immutable partition (such as, you guessed it, its own AI models). Taking up 2% of the disk space without consent is definitely Not Cool.
Another angle is the processing cost, I assume Google is seeking to offload the computation for whatever features this covers from their own data centers to end users. On the scale of billions that's probably measurable and from google's side worth doing whether the users is paying for the service or not, and each of them will have more power usage with some reduced battery life on portable devices. At that scale I'd also wonder about efficiency based on what proportion of end users are using AI or running it on CPU/GPU/NPU.
I would more worry about storage space on some laptops with pretty small SSDs like 192-256GB of official capacity prior installing Windows, 4GB of that is already pretty significant part of storage space for something which should be opt-in.
What is petabytes if not 4GB at Chrome userbase scale?
The next Netflix breakout show will burn this planet to the grounds :)
4Gb times 2,000,000,000 chrome installs gives us 8,000 petabytes. Are we allowed to worry now?
Agreed, my eyes rolled hard at that. Definitely more of an F-U to users with bad connections than anything else.
Its unsollicited. Not everyone has fiber either
not just fiber, e.g. Netflix requires "only" (reliable) ~15Mb/s for a 4k stream, that means most people in most countries feel little difference between ~25 Mb/s and 1Gb/s in their "every day" usage. Sure it's a huge difference if you download a 80GiB AAA game, or preload a 4k movie. But in my experience (which definitely doesn't apply to all countries) a lot of non tech affine people don't do that that often an if they do it (e.g. movies before travel) they tend to do it over the night so it still works out just fine with not so fast internet.<p>So for a lot of people paying for more then 25-50Mb/s (pro person) makes only sense if it isn't too costly. Hence I rarely see people going for more then 250-500 Mb/s even iff 1Gb/s is available and they have money. And for non-gamers with little money, I mostly see them with ~50Mb/s (or paying for 50Mb/s but getting much less due to old wires :( ).<p>(Also IMHO The more important things compared to 1Gb/s is how much of the bought bandwidth is reliably available at all times _with good latency_...)
A 4gb unbidden download is insane! I'm still running machines with 30gb HDs.<p>I blame the kids these days (waggles fist), downloading their Pokiman shows t 4-5gb a pop! No respect for their disk space limited elders.<p>I'm actually gonna have to uninstall chrome from a few machines tonight.
I think this policy will disable the automatic download of the model:<p><a href="https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings" rel="nofollow">https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#GenAILocalFoundati...</a><p>The prompt API can be tested here: <a href="https://chrome.dev/web-ai-demos/prompt-api-playground/" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.dev/web-ai-demos/prompt-api-playground/</a><p>It would be really helpful if there was a way to download the model to a central location, so multiple users on a single system could easily share it.
Wow, so glad to see this on HN because yesterday coincidentally I told codex to figure out what was taking up space on my computer and lo and behold their was an ai model in my chrome folder... And i certainly didnt recall downloading that myself.
[delayed]
Somebody's promotion packet depended on pushing this through the approval process.
Looks like the site's struggling to keep up with the traffic. A couple mirror links:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatp...</a><p><a href="https://archive.ph/sM7O5" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/sM7O5</a> (missing images and styling, but the content all seems to be there)
I am trying to wrap my head around this: if I remove Chrome Browser, will I reclaim the disk space for this model? Thanks in advance.
The site is currently unavailable 503 so I can't read it. But I wonder, what should you consent to? Every dependency? Every dependency above 1GB?
Maybe consent is not an appropriate term. Perhaps an acknowledgement and a way to say "I don't want this" would be a more suitable approach. I feel like a flag to turn off LLMs is useful. Firefox added something like this in a recent release. I don't know how much they're downloading or how much they run it, nor would I be a good judge if it's necessary or not, but I don't want that functionality in my browser so turned it off.
There's a setting in `chrome://flags` mentioned in the post that allows users to turn this off. I guess people want opt-in consent rather opt-out consent which there's always debate about. Some people say it degrades the experience for the majority of users who would opt-in for the happiness of the few possibly already detracting users.
Isn't that asking for consent?
the subject has been faced many years ago an super well applied in EU privacy regulations: Google knows it very well, and in super details and I have no doubt they will be fined for this despite all reduction of it thanks to their lobbying (and corruptions, too, in my super personal opinion): this fact well explain EU fines based on company's income.
Extra power and ram usage without your permission, for example.
Exactly, for all the hate of Windows, I could at least just look for shit named co-pilot and uninstall it for a pretty nice experience on my new computer. Phones aren't always as straightforward (especially jarring as "Google services" are required in Sweden on Android for stuff like mobile identity systems).
Does that include the CPU burning cat girl captchas or not?
Don't install chrome in the first place then
Hello iOS upgrade.
Read the article, it's not about that, but a mere 4GB of storage.
Oh and why is it there? Do you really think it's not loaded and executed automatically by default, so some Google executive can justify their "AI" spend?
4GB of storage is not a “mere” thing, to the contrary.
That ship has sailed on the web a long time ago.
Man the longer all this crap goes on the more I realise Stallman was right
If anything I am glad a bit of shift to local llm's. Their gemma4 is pretty powerful for such small model so I guess that's what they are delivering.
I wonder what this model will do and if anyone can map out its capabilities?
And that's why we have, promote, and (hopefully) all use Chromium on our Linuxes.<p>Or Firefox of course.
And that will be 4GB per chrome instance I assume? (not profiles, <i>instances</i>) And what happens with each electron app if it uses chrome?<p>languagemodel should be an OS service..
Wait for Ladybug to come out, it'll bury all the company-controlled browsers.
I use brave. Firefox doesn't work in my qemu VM with (none pass through) hardware acceleration, it just crashes the VM.<p>Brave has always just worked for me and seems light on memory usage. Dunno why anyone would use chrome.
If you're not aware already, there's also Brave origin: <a href="https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/38561489788173-What-is-Brave-Origin" rel="nofollow">https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/38561489788173-W...</a><p>A lighter Brave.
I was working on on-device AI for 3 years. This was the prime idea we were exploring, how can someone undercut the OS providers and ship an LLM that other apps can also use on-device.
Like if meta decides to do this, it can serve an API to all mobile app companies for an on-device LLM long before the OS is there.
This is Google's way of reaching LLM distribution on laptops, since they don't have their own
One upside to this is that it doesn't use Gemma and instead uses Gemini. So at least for Gemini Nano (apparently called XS internally by Google) it means that the weights are now de facto open and you no longer need a current Android phone to get the latest and best model in this class. This also makes it the only open American frontier-level model right now.
> At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push.<p>Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.<p>> For users on capped mobile data plans, particularly in regions where smartphone-as-only-internet is dominant (much of Africa, much of South and Southeast Asia, most of Latin America), 4 GB of unrequested download is on the order of a month's data allowance, vapourised by Chrome on the user's behalf. Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered.<p>THIS is a valid concern. Otherwise I'm not buying into "ask for consent because of dependency X". Users don't like questions/consents.<p>However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.
> Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.<p>Why not? It's about 60 000 London - New York City flights by the way (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/jul/19/carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...</a>). And what's the benefit again?
Some parts of the anti-AI movement are becoming so unhinged that now any use of compute is considered an environmental threat. This degrowth mentality needs to die.
Should I reminder you what unlimited growth means and how it ends up in biology? Society/technology is no exception.
If it's emissions they worry about, then it's anything emitting.<p>Are they against washing machines too? Or are they just grandfathered in?
This is literally why the EU mandates appliance energy efficiency.<p>It's never a binary thing. "Is using energy good or bad?" is a stupid question which can only provide stupid answers. It has to be placed in the context of whether it's proportionate to benefit.<p>Things which burn a lot of energy for little benefit - and in the case of AI, often negative benefit - end up more towards the "bad".
Don't be disingenuous. Not all energy is created equally.
Our planet is literally dying.<p>The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]<p>Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.<p>What you're proposing is nothing short of a death cult. It's either degrowth or <i>we all die</i>, sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound-impacts-record-ocean-heat-intensifying-climate-disasters" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-locked-arctic-ice-millennia-unleash-wave-deadly-diseases" rel="nofollow">https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disaster-bushfires.html" rel="nofollow">https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...</a>?
Have you ever made a decision to NOT download something, turn on your computer, experiment, etc based on your perceived impact on the planet?<p>I mean this should (and is) be tackled at the source: 0/low emission energy generation and not consumer having to think about these decisions. Sustainable data centers using renewables etc. But not that the companies should associate/evaluate/consider bytes downloaded with environmental impact.
> this should (and is) be tackled at the source: 0/low emission energy generation and not consumer having to think about these decisions.<p>Until we're at that point though, the 'winners' in this market society (that wield unimaginable amounts of money = resources) such as Google could certainly think about consequences of their choices. And they usually do to some extent, I'm not saying they don't, just that electric supply and demand has two sides to it
>not consumer having to think about these decisions<p>Consumers vote and advocate for what they want and don't want. There are many who say it's not an individual problem and should be dealt with broadly through regulation, then also oppose any attempts at regulation.
I'm going to assume you work in tech and know the issues that come with scale.<p>Me, individually not doing something is gonna absolutely be drowned out by the scale of many other people not thinking of it or being incentivized against it.<p>This is a systemic issue. A systemic issue needs a systemic solution, not a blame shift to the individual.<p>We didn't get rid of lead in gas or asbestos in walls by telling people it was bad for them. We did so by banning it.
Why do you attribute to capitalism an issue that is much more fundamental than it? People want more stuff and better lives, it's as simple as that. Even hunger/gatherer societies brought themselves to extinction multiple times in the past, and I doubt the USSR would have fared better against climate change.<p>Technological progress is also societal progress. If we embraced degrowth in the 1800's (there was a ton of pollution back then, and a Malthusian belief in disaster!) we might not see slavery being abolished or women being able to vote.
> People want more stuff and better lives, it's as simple as that.<p>Not everyone wants this at the cost of others. It's not as simple as that / not a necessary consequence of our desire to find clever solutions to solve everyday inconveniences
Because capitalism ties together better lives an ideological belief in unbounded growth.<p>Will people's lives really be better once they're drowning or choking on wildfire smoke? But hey, at least they had cheap junk!<p>It's possible to have better lives as well as societal progress without endless growth. Technological progress, too, doesn't have to mean burning our oceans. We just gotta actually think about the costs and consequences of our actions.<p>Not every technological development is inherently good. Sometimes the cost is not worth the result. I posit the cost of AI so far has been astronomical, higher than anything else in living memory. The results on the other hand have been rather middling.<p>This is my issue. A cost/benefit analysis, not a strict no to progress.
I know it takes extra steps to make Android perform OS or app updates over LTE. I doubt it's downloading a 4GB model over LTE unless the user has chosen to perform updates over LTE.
> However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.<p>Unfortunately, that automation is unreliable. It doesn't work across operating systems - Windows laptops won't enable data-saver mode when connected to iPhones and macOS laptops won't when connected to Android phones, and neither will enable it when connected to, say, public transport wifi.<p>And even if the OS has the information, websites can't reliably use it either. Firefox and Safari both don't implement the NetworkInformation API [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInformation" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...</a>
I don't get the outrage. AAA games routinely take 100-200 GBs. I certainly prefer local inference to feeding google my private data over the network (assuming they actually don't do that anyway...)
I download a game with intent, and they're stored on a larger drive than where my programs/user data is installed.
A modest-sized security patch is routinely several gigabytes.<p>Hell, a few hours of browsing Tiktok or Youtube will take more bandwidth.<p>This is fake engagement bait.
I already pay for an LLM, and one that's much smarter than Gemini Nano. I didn't ask for this, I didn't make any choice for it to be installed, and I almost certainly won't ever use it.
It's a good time to be using Vivaldi.
On one level, I can't figure out how bent out of shape to get over this (but read on). Software I use downloads updates all the time, adds new features all the time, and I mostly don't ask for any of it.<p>So if you see this as just a new feature that provides some on-device AI, it's a bit, so what? A new feature? The last GT7 or Flight Sim patch was bigger than this, what's the big deal, etc.<p>However, that's <i>not</i> really what's going on. It theory Chrome gives you a local LLM that can provide local AI powered features. In practice, everything gets sent to the cloud anyway so the local LLM seems mostly to exist as a disguise for that, which is shady AF.<p>As others have pointed out, the solution is <a href="https://www.firefox.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.firefox.com/</a>. And whilst it's been trendy on HN for several years to slag off Firefox and Mozilla, I went back to Firefox as my daily driver several years ago, and Chrome's high-handed enforcement of Manifest V3 extensions (meaning no full fat uBlock Origin) has only served to cement that decision.<p>It's mostly been great. The only downside is that some sites don't work properly on Firefox, and I'm 99.999% sure that's not Firefox's fault.<p>For example, Paypal's post-login verification step breaks so every time I want to buy something using Paypal I have to switch to Chrome. And, no, disabling uBlock Origin and other extensions on Paypal doesn't help - I've done this already. Seriously, Paypal, it's been months: will you please just fix signing in and paying on Firefox, please?<p>And many sites will assume you're a bot first and ask questions later if you hit them with anything other than Chrome or Safari... which is also extremely lame and scummy.
I don't think that adding the feature is the issue here, but instead Google deciding it needs to push an order of magnitude more data and store it on your device. I can understand wanting to at least re-evaluate your use of a tool when that happens.<p>If you were to install Chrome fresh, what if it was a 4GB+ download from their website? I would at least pause. For reference, a regular offline installer is 140MB.
Weird, I access PayPal through FF all the time. It's probably one of those weird geographical differences or something. One thing I did see is that at least one site (AliExpress) doesn't initiate the redirect after the payment, but still accepted the payment.
Botnet browser does botnet things, not surprised.
What a massive fail on Google's part. They could have given you the option to auth to Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT (or whatever) and provided a meaningfully better product and experience. But instead, they chose to push their crap on everyone. This is the bullshit I expect from Microsoft, not Google.
Good time to try Orion! <a href="https://orionbrowser.com" rel="nofollow">https://orionbrowser.com</a>
Well,<p><pre><code> npm install …
</code></pre>
did worse
that's a willing act - you are actively asking npm to download something, and accepting it might be terrible for you.<p>Here chrome is just installing things behind your back, whether you really want it or not.
If only Chrome had deferred implementing delta updates back in 2009 (?), they could have introduced it along with this to make it a net zero change!
While I find the issue at hand extremely annoying and in poor taste (and this is not news - this was known in advance) - the same applies to the blog. This annoying clickbaity SEO slop of a blog seems to exist only to advertise their consultation services.
chrome://on-device-internals/<p>..will tell you everything you need to know - including model state, file path, device capabilities, etc.<p><i>And there's a single button to uninstall the model.</i><p>There is also the ability to load a model from a central location, as suggested by another commenter here, although I haven't tested it yet.<p>The official chrome.dev Prompt API Playground linked in the thread doesn't work.<p>Chatgpt made a me tiny chrome extension to test the prompt and summariser api's when they announced last year - my laptop wasn't capable the time but these newer models are obviously smaller and more efficient, so it has sprung into life.<p>Full prompt and code is on pastebin `7Ja3ATHZ` if anyone wants to test quickly. It summarises the current page and brainstorms app ideas based on the summary.
While the official Prompt API Playground doesn't work, the one for the Summarization API does...<p><a href="https://chrome.dev/web-ai-demos/summarization-api-playground/" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.dev/web-ai-demos/summarization-api-playground...</a><p>and you can watch it generate the output token by token in the Event Logs:<p>chrome://on-device-internals/
Google/Alphabet is a big company<p>On the one hand, Waymo seems to have a better safety record than Tesla does. That's not nothing. For someone nominally in charge of SpaceX like Elon is, it's a red flag<p>On the other, Google does things like this with Chrome, and also they arguably censor. It's irritating
Time to switch.
>Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent.<p>Oh my god thats terrible I hope you continue this article in this mode and dont pivot to some unsubstantiated bs claim that makes absolutely no sense...<p>>At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.<p>sigh.<p>Imagine if everyone on the planet start using a memory hogging, cpu chugging browser application what a terrible hazard that would be for the climate.<p>Oh and it might have an AI component in it.<p>This claim is worse than the AI in data centers boiling the earth claims.<p>We can measure carbon released down to the watt. If you have an issue with people using power, shut up and talk to your government about carbon taxation/moving to alternative power sources. trying to shame <i>some</i> power users, quite arbitrarily isn't just senseless its self defeating. Its a measurement problem, the second people start getting shaky measurements of what their neighbors are doing, they start trying to shift the blame.
Like the recent copilot silent signing incident, the without consent part is blatant foul move.<p>If you don't like be treated like anything but human, you should seriously consider replacing chrome with ungoogled chromium or other browsers.
it's so absurd at this point. isn't chrome already so much abused.
> The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched.<p>God, I'm SICK of this AI slop style. After ingesting terabytes of pirated books you'd expect a little bit more variety in it's writing.
Like 2/3 posts on HN now have this "No X. No Y. No Z." pattern. It's one of strong signals for me that the author didn't bother and just copy pasted their LLM's output as is. And the LLM mostly likely was pointed at some other resource to write the article, and I'd rather read the original. I think HN needs a policy to replace AI slop articles with the original articles/announcements etc. once detected, and technically the guidelines already cover it: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."<p>>After ingesting terabytes of pirated books you'd expect a little bit more variety in it's writing.<p>I think it's the result of post-training. The original base model most likely had a less slopy style. This style is what AI companies think is a good style (they specifically train for it).
I think this is a bad framing.<p>Javascript running on a page can use a feature that requires a model to be downloaded.<p>I have pages that use it, or other LLM models via LiteRT or HuggingFace transformers.js.<p>I try to warn the user, but that is my responsibility as a page author. I <i>like</i> that this is enabling the web platform to remain competitive.<p>The author is pulling a long bow by trying to claim this is some GDPR violation. Have they ever used the web? There are inefficient sites everywhere, with autoplaying video etc.<p>4GB isn't nothing, but if a page wants to use it then hopefully it is useful to the user!
This has to be some kind of a limited rollout, since none of my machines have this AI model installed even when Chrome is updated to the latest version. No indication that anything is being downloaded, since after updating to the latest version of Chrome on this machine, I'm seeing <100 kB/s download speeds for the entire system.
I feel this is great in combination with an agent like OpenClaw or Hermes.
So typical. Just imagining the consequences for someone with chronically low disk space, like me. Luckily I'm a Firefox person, though I use Vivaldi now and then.
Google abuses users.<p>You can also ask why the US government fails to protect the users. Corporate dictatorship at its finest.
This is egregious and the only people who can get away with it are these Big Tech companies. The legal analysis is moot. They have operated with impunity for decades. The law, especially with AI, only applies to organizations that Big Tech and the government want to eliminate. Rules for thee, not for me.
I can't read the article (503) but does anyone know why someone calling themselves that<i>privacy</i>guy is installing Google Chrome?
Why the hell can't this just be an extension in the first place? Why does it have to be bolted in by default? Why does Google and by extension its employees have this constant need to assault and violate me with this garbage?
it also installs an entire remote desktop stack on your computer without consent, and video codecs, and pdf reader... what is new here?
That's crazy just another reason I've been degoogling my phone.
Besides the numbers being stupidly overblown, this post shows why Europe is in a unstoppable death spiral.
I can't for the life of me understand how this browser has become the world's most used. It's literally from an ad company.
If only there was an orange canine coming to help us
I thought using local rather than cloud AI was pretty universally agreed to be good?
The universally agreed upon good is leaving the choice to use AI or not to the end user.
There is a secret, third option.
Except these weights are barely used. Read the article.
Thanks for reminding, it was a moment of weakness. Here is the relevant quote:<p>> the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in <textarea>, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus
Sorry but the whole climate angle on this is extremely stupid and needs to be challenged. I have noticed this new phenomenon of people using climate as a trump card to oppose any thing they don’t like.<p>The thing about these kind of arguments is that any economic activity or any sort of action involves some load on climate. The magnitudes are important.<p>In this case: a single hamburger does the same amount of emissions as 50 such downloads. What’s really the point of this kind of virtue signalling?
> In this case: a single hamburger does the same amount of emissions as 50 such downloads<p>Hamburger is usually held up as a grotesque example in climate talk and can't be consumed with a clear conscious so are downloads insanely worse than we thought or is a hamburger not even in the same realm of climate damage as usually claimed.
There is consumer demand for hamburgers. There is no consumer demand for AI, hence how egregious that it also comes with negative externalities.
This is a bit disingenuous. If you install Chrome, you install Chrome and all it's parts. They don't ask your consent for individual parts because that would be absurd. If you don't want Chrome and all its parts, don't use it.
If I install Chrome, I expect it to take a few hundred MBs and then only take up additional space in a controlled and transparent manner - for its cache, for example. For me, secretly adding 4GB after installation is a bit too much.<p>If you're okay with 4GB being added, where would you draw a line? What if it downloaded a 40GB file? 400GB?
Personally I draw the line where Chrome becomes worse than alternatives, and then I switch.<p>Lately Firefox has been getting better, but I still prefer Chrome for almost all my needs, so I stick to it. This barely even makes a difference to me. If it was 400GB however it would make a difference to me, and I would make more of an effort to switch to something else.
This is not a reasonable size for something that's "just another part of Chrome", this blows up the file size by many times
Chrome is the default browser on Android.
"Oh but the climate costs" Who cares?<p>Doing LLM locally is more climate efficient than doing in datacenters<p>I stopped reading here because I know this is the ramblings of a whiny person that will contribute nothing, will solve nothing and is occupying space on the internet. Whatever is the climate cost of those kbytes of the page, it seems too much for me
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I use Firefox as my main browser but occasionally run into Chrome requirements for certain web apps so end up begrudgingly installing it. I'm in the habit of going straight to the chrome flags page and turning off all this junk exactly because disk usage of chrome is ridiculous otherwise.
I did the same thing, but realized I was contributing to the problem. If a web app requires Chrome for full functionality, then us switching browsers is giving them permission to continue and expand their invasive practices.<p>These days, I just navigate away from anything that demands I use Chrome "for best results." One of the sites for a local utility company does this, so instead I just call monthly and pay or manage my service by phone. I'm old enough to remember when that was the preferred way after mailing personal cheques went the way of the dodo, so it does not feel that inconvenient to me, but I can see where it might for other people. Still, nobody said the fight to regaining our agency online would be easy. Or convenient.
What's another 4gb of disk space when computer hardware prices are soaring into unobtanium?<p>I hate how much companies don't care about efficiency or their customers. It's like windows 11 requiring like 2 more GB of RAM just to see your desktop, what an upgrade, yuck.
Like what?<p>I think the only time I've ever had to use Chrome instead of Firefox was because of some USB device thing that worked inside Chrome. Otherwise everything just works in Firefox.
Most recently it was the configuration app for my keyboard firmware, and then video calling in FB messenger (that one might work in other browsers besides Chrome. I didn't dig too much).
The sites my colleagues and I produce. They consider Chrome === Standard and everything else a deviation for which they may begrudgingly fix obvious bugs in once pressed. It's seldom that entire sites will break in other browsers, but instead they simply do not work in some ways like modals sometimes breaking, or XHR requests failing, or performance being bad.<p>It's frustrating.
Yea. Anyone still using chrome at this point must really love getting emails about class action lawsuits from Google. My god.
I am using Firefox for years now. It's such a splendid experience.<p>I can recommend the following extensions:<p>- Youtube Enhancer<p>- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials<p>- Cookie Auto Decline (a MUST for Europeans)<p>- Slop Evader<p>- No Gender (a MUST for Germans)<p>Its a totally different browsing experience than what most people have.<p>I recently watched my kiddo looking something up with Edge on her laptop. I had to interfere and install Firefox. It was ridicolous!!! The amount of spam on the screen. How people can cope with this is beyond me. Especially if the solution doesn't cost anything. Just Firefox + some free extensions.<p>edit: because people asked about the No Gender extension:<p>Germany didn't have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago.<p>Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.<p>in regular German, it would translate to:<p>Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.<p>In gendered German, it became:<p>Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.<p>For me, it ruins the reading experience.
For me the most important extension is uBlock Origin. It's worth switching to Firefox for this alone.
Without your ublock origin browsing the net is quite horrible these days
Youtube is virtually unwatchable without it. I honestly have no idea how most people cope. Truth is, even with an adblocker there's so much rubbish on the page that gets in my way. Invidous is much better but it's too unreliable.<p>Sites that autoplay a video, which follows you as you scroll are the worst.
Or for real control, uMatrix (yes there are madmen like me still stubbornly hanging on)
that + NoScript. That latter is a must for me.
Firefox added split view where you can look at two (or more) webpages side by side. This is a lifesaver when you have to fill up a form looking up stuff from another page!
Isn’t this kind of the job of the OS windowing system? It’s maybe slightly nicer to share the window chrome for two tabs but it’s not like looking at two browser tabs in parallel was impossible before.
Yes, and both Windows and MacOS have features to put things side by side... but they're not very intuitive and may require multiple inputs to achieve what the browser(s) do with one or two presses. On MacOS you have to long-press the "maximize" button, for example. I forgot that was a thing before reading this actually, but then I use the third-party tool Rectangle for window management.
Sure, but this is a lot nicer because when they are separate windows, and you have more windows, and if you have to alt-tab to check something else, it is a bit flow-breaking to bring these exact two windows back on top.
Yes, but they are grouped under one single tab, so for me at least is more easy to alt-tab to other app and return to the split view.
Chrome does this split-screen. Web browsers <i>are</i> operating systems, for all intents & purposes.<p>Ask any Emacs evangelist.
Can you explain what the "No Gender" extension is about and why it is a must?
It removes gender speech (<i>Leser*innen</i> becomes <i>Leser</i>), which can be awkward and hurt the reading flow.
It seems like you would lose meaning by automatically replacing words, no? Why would you want to censor your internet experience, just because you find someone else's use of language awkward?
It's still the same word, just as generic masculine. Gender speech isn't part of the German language but an add-on with no standardization (that's why there are multiple different approaches). Apart from looking awkward one of the main criticisms is that it hurts the reading flow. Following that point the extension improves the reading experience.
Germany didn't have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago. It’s a terrible reading experience and super annoying.<p>Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.<p>it was<p>Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.<p>and it became:<p>Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.<p>It’s insane.
Forgive my ignorance, but it seems that there is more information in the "explicitly inclusive" form than the "implicitly inclusive" one. Doesn't the existence of the inclusive form allow you to explicitly use a non-inclusive form? So in this case<p>Lehrer being explicitly male
and Lehrer:innen being explicitly inclusive?<p>I appreciate that this seems to be an emotional topic, but if people choose to use language in a new way, would it not be best to not withhold that information from you as a reader? Someone else wrote that it's like using an ad-blocker, but if I were to read an article, I would want to read it in the exact form someone wrote it, no? It's a bit like Americans auto-replacing "fucking" with "f***g" in their browsers to avoid an annoyance, but they lose information in the process.
When was it introduced and why? It seems in the opposite direction of travel from many languages, which have been trying to make more gender neutral options available.<p>(exception: Chinese didn't really bother with gendered pronouns until about the nineteenth century, due to the need to translate European languages, so some had to be introduced)
German feminist are looking for a long time to eliminate the generic masculine form. But unlike English, which allows you to use they/them to refer to both genders - and which i kind of like - German doesnt have such an option.<p>So since my youth, multiple proposal have been put forward, among which the gender-star. Lehrer -> Lehrer*innen, Lehrer:innen.<p>It was never taken seriously, until we got a left wing government (2022 or so) and since then its getting more and more used. Especially in progressive media. Some even speak it. With a short break that represents the star or :. Sounds pretty stupid, but people do it.<p>In my mind, its the ultimate form of virtue signalling :-)<p>but hey. to each their own. I just prefer to ignore it if possible
People use the extension for the same reason people use other content blockers against advertisement, notices banners, social media widgets and so on, namely not to suffer avoidable annoyances.<p>> you would lose meaning<p>No meaning is lost that has not been there before.<p>> someone else's use of language awkward<p>Most would judge that it's not just awkward, but grating.
Doesn't really seem like a MUST then...
I edited my comment to include an answer to your question.
I'd like to know too. I struggled to understand the description of the extension - is it an anti-woke thing, or some sort of modern approach to German removing the traditional (i.e. non-political) genderisation of some words, or both, or something else?
Example: Reader<p>In German: Leser (masculine)<p>Possible forms of <i>inclusive speech</i>: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen<p>This extension removes these possible forms of inclusive speech. Arguably they hurt the reading flow and the German language has the generic masculine. However, proponents of inclusive speech feel that the generic masculine isn't inclusive.
A bit of both? Imagine every time you read the word "actor", it is instead spelled something like "actor:ress", or "actor_ress", or "actor*ress" (because the separator hasn't been standardised).<p>Personally I'm in favour of it, but I will concede that if it's done enough times throughout the text (as German has way more gendered nouns in common use than English) it does come with the downside of breaking the reading flow.
The first. In German, many words that refer to a person (e.g. Fahrer/Fahrerin, male/female driver) have a plural which is identical to the male singular. For a while now, many writers have used a typographic style to make the plural gender-neutral by writing the male plural, an asterisk, and then the female plural suffix (e.g. Fahrer*innen).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_star" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_star</a>
Thanks - that's really interesting, in a weird-interesting way.<p>I'm far from an expert in such things, but I'd observed that the approach in English to gendered words (actor vs. actress) seemed to be, over time, to drift towards calling everyone an actor - as a neutral term, to avoid treating women differently, rather than a male term per se.<p>In German, from your explanation, it's gone the opposite way - aggressively maintaining the female option because of a dislike of broad adoption of the male version as a neutral default.
It's not "aggressively maintaining the female option", it's just a language quirk. English has a gender-neutral "the" article which you put in front of every noun, German has three different variations of "the" depending on the gender (der/die/das). Literally every noun has a gender, including inanimate objects such as a piece of furniture. "The table" is always masculine ("der Tisch"), "the lamp" is always feminine ("die Lampe") and "the bed" is always neutral ("das Bett"). Sometimes changing the article completely changes the meaning of the word, for example "der See" is the lake, but "die See" can be the sea or the ocean.<p>Only living things can have more than one gender and in that case, not only does the article change, but so does the suffix. There is no "singress" in English, only "singer", but in German there's "der Sänger" or "die Sängerin". Calling a female singer "der Sänger" would be grammatically-speaking completely incorrect.<p>The only thing that changed fairly recently is that more and more people intentionally try to maintain gender ambiguity when they don't intent to specify a gender, in which case "the singer" becomes "die Sänger:in", or even "der:die Sänger:in" if you want to be even more pedantic.
Thanks; maybe I didn't explain my point well enough, but I know/understand everything you just wrote.<p>> The only thing that changed fairly recently is that more and more people intentionally try to maintain gender ambiguity when they don't intent to specify a gender, in which case "the singer" becomes "die Sänger:in", or even "der:die Sänger:in" if you want to be even more pedantic.<p>Here is my point: in English, the move to gender neutrality of certain words (e.g. actor/actress) seems to have involved adopting the male version, and using it as neutral. (I don't know if some people are offended by this, but if they are, I've not come across it).<p>In contrast, in German, I impute that some people would be offended by using the male version of a word as a default neutral for all including women, so are deliberately maintaining the female version within the slightly awkward <i>"Sänger:in"</i> construct.<p>This is a strong, deliberate choice, in contrast to (what I see as) the more passive "eh, let's just use 'actor'" in English.
English already has done this: fireman->firefighter, policeman->officer, mankind->humankind, man->humanity, etc.
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- Ublock origin
- decentraleyes
Extensions are a vector for vulnerabilities and malware though. Its happened many times already.
Switched over to Waterfox recently, nice alternative with some added extras for privacy etc.
The browser with a sidebar AI chatbot? What a simple solution.
You don't have to have the sidebar chatbot thing. When mozilla added these AI features, after the update the browser prompted me to whether I want it or not, with the "yes" and "no" being equally easy to select. It did not add them without consent. You can disable all AI features altogether, or you can completely remove chatbot sidebar specifically (with 2 clicks) and have the rest of the features if you want them.<p>Gosh most of the time when I read people complain about firefox, it gives me the impression they have not even used firefox.
That's neat. Firefox has never prompted me on any of my instances and the sidebar is still present. Wish they would ask everyone for consent.
I would prefer a browser without any ai slop.
This is article about Chrome doing something undesirable with AI. Which can be easily disabled by going into chrome://flags.
And suggestion is to download Firefox which is also doing something undesirable with AI. Which is also can be easily disabled.
Seems both browsers are quite similar in this regard, so suggestion to replace one with another is not very helpful?
Firefox lets you disable all AI features with 1 setting switch.
LibreWolf.
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Don't need a VPN for that, a fake moustache is enough. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48018080">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48018080</a>
Take responsibility for your kids. Talk to them (or ask someone you trust to do it) about what is acceptable in your household and elsewhere.
That's really a bullshit argument. First off, there are plenty of technical solutions that allow minors (15-17 years old) to bypass the restrictions: using sites that don't follow the law, using Tor, etc. But furthermore, these measures to restrict access to porn are counterproductive for sex workers, because it makes their situation more precarious, and they only exist to weaponize the "think of the children" narrative in order to push draconian laws and social control. Soon it will be social media's turn, and then the entire internet asking for an ID. This isn't just an empty "slippery slope" argument, it's exactly what regulators are currently doing in all Western countries.
Won't someone think of the kids! Not the parents, no, they should be increasing shareholder value. /s
... and it takes up 50% CPU on 16 cores just to run a video call. Laptop battery drains in 30 minutes.<p>Chrome doesn't do that. I literally can't use Firefox anywhere I don't have a power socket.<p>My laptop also becomes a toaster.
Oh is this the browser by that company that are funded half a billion dollars a year by Google and want to become an advertising company[1] and wants their browser to become a modern AI browser[2]?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-on-them-being-an-advertising-company-now/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-o...</a>
[2] <a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-enzor-demeo-new-ceo/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...</a>
Yes, that one! It's great, I can recommend it.
... that recently added a setting which allows you to entirely disable any AI enhancements? <a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-ai-controls#w_block-new-and-current-ai-features-single-switch" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-ai-controls#w_b...</a> I mean Mozilla / Firefox aren't perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than Chrome and this comment does feel a bit like the perfect being the enemy of the good.
Please feel free to suggest a better alternative.
<a href="https://zen-browser.app/" rel="nofollow">https://zen-browser.app/</a>
Not being able to suggest an alternative for Chrome doesn't imply that Firefox is a good alternative.<p>On GrapheneOS they recommend Vanadium - a more secure Chromium fork - and specifically recommend against Firefox, but that's on mobile.
> Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox/Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android.<p>> The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.<p>Context is definitely interesting to have with your statement (From <a href="https://grapheneos.org/usage" rel="nofollow">https://grapheneos.org/usage</a>).
Firefox _is_ a good alternative to chrome, though, by the arguments OP brought. What OP complained about are even worse in chrome.<p>FF is largely funded by google money? Chrome _is_ google.<p>FF invests in AI features? Google invests even more in AI features and shoves them to you without consent (which ff asked me for after upgrades).<p>Maybe FF is not perfect or great or whatever by one's point of view, but it _is better_ than chrome, at least regarding these arguments.
That's fair and true. I guess my issue with Firefox is that Google is obviously Google, and you know what to expect from a company like that. Mozilla is pretending to be an underdog while at the same time they are Google by proxy - aiming to bring more telemetry, more advertising, more AI and doing it with Google's money which they take partly so that Google can say they aren't a monopoly.<p>It's the sneaky ways that Firefox are Google that bother me. Above you said that they recently added a switch to disable AI - only after backlash (though I have to admit that the original blog post said there should be an option to disable it). I also dislike that they are focusing on AI and advertising instead of improving their browser, but that's their decision.
Graphene user here: Firefox is my standard browser because I like it but mostly because it runs ublock Origin (which again causes me to like it). Vanadium I use for social media sites so I'm not logged in to those on the primary browser.
<a href="https://ladybird.org/" rel="nofollow">https://ladybird.org/</a>
Helium has all the benefits of Chromium but none of the Google bloat or other crazy AI, Crypto, Gaming or whatever ideas other browsers ship.<p>Just uBlock Origin pre-installed<p><a href="https://helium.computer/" rel="nofollow">https://helium.computer/</a>
FWIW I've recently moved from Firefox to Helium after 10+ years.<p>Yes, I hate that it's also Chromium, but no, there aren't real alternatives.
We Should Improve Society Somewhat
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Sounds like you've jumped to conclusions without reading the whole thing, or are making a disingenuous connection between two very different concepts. Climate impacts (really just energy waste) and "legal" arguments are different parts of this article. The legal part centers around whether they have permission to install this model along with Chrome, and whether they are using deceptive practices related to the model.<p>"Article 5(3) of Directive 2002/58/EC (the ePrivacy Directive) prohibits the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user, without the user's prior, freely-given, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent, except where strictly necessary for the provision of an information-society service explicitly requested by the user..."<p>That is not about climate.<p>The article goes on to say that there would not be a legal issue if Google simply asked, documented, not taken initial action without user approval, allow deletion, etc. Also not about climate.<p>What they do imply is that Google's being dishonest if they say that they are carbon neutral (as is often said in their Environmental, Social, and Governance reports) while imposing up to 250 GWh of power use on network providers and end users. I can see the concern.
> Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered.<p>This is satire, obviously.
Clearly, you've never lived in Germany or other places that still have data caps and slow and unreliable internet connections.<p>Yes, 4GB of unintended traffic can <i>absolutely</i> wreck someone's finances.
Does anyone else find the writing in the article to be overdramatic? Including a 4gb is a negligible amount of space for current hardware and Chrome is not known as the browser to run on resource constrained devices. To put 4gb in context, I currently have 2 *tabs* open that nearly take up 4gb. The fact Chrome also has a way to disable this makes it kind of a nothingburger in my opinion.<p>> The roughly 4 GB × N devices of disk-storage cost, sustained, on user hardware. SSDs have a per-GB embodied carbon cost of approximately 0.16 kg CO2e per GB of NAND manufactured [18]<p>The estimated environmental aspect of the download also seems like an overblown point, noted for sensationalism. There are always hand-wavy numbers involved and I had to look no further than the quote above to find evidence of this. The reference for [18], "The dirty secret of SSDs: embodied carbon", incorrectly links to "Toward Carbon-Aware Networking" and makes no mention of the environmental cost of SSDs. After looking up "The Dirty Secret of SSDs: Embodied Carbon" myself, I was able to see the same methodologies as I was expecting used [1].<p>> We conducted an analysis encompassing 94 Life Cycle Assessment
(LCA) reports, which collectively quantify the embodied cost of
SSDs. Owing to the scarcity of direct and up-to-date LCA studies
focused specifically on SSDs. We compiled a dataset comprising
LCA reports pertaining to Server, Workstation, Desktop, Laptop,
and Chromebook products, all of which feature SSDs<p>All these studies rely on metrics extrapolated from layered assumptions and end up being used by those who try to use them as objective numbers.<p>[1] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10793" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10793</a>
4gb isn't really a negligible amount, given the amount of desktops and laptops sold with just a 256gb ssd
Exactly. Nand is expensive. I upgraded what my laptop came with but after installing a few games, cloning repositories over the years, various projects I've done, and other regular use, it's perpetually full. 4GB is probably about half the space I have free at any given time<p>Which apparently means it'll never install btw, even if I were to run Chrome. Another comment said they check for 22GB free space
> Including a 4gb is a negligible amount of space for current hardware and Chrome is not known as the browser to run on resource constrained devices.<p>4gb definitely isn’t a negligible amount of space on most people’s devices.<p>The quite successful it would seem MacBook Neo has 256GB of storage in its base configuration.<p>A MacBook Air and a basic sub $1000 Dell laptop starts at 512GB.<p>> To put 4gb in context, I currently have 2 <i>tabs</i> open that nearly take up 4gb.<p>You are conflating disk and memory.<p>> The fact Chrome also has a way to disable this makes it kind of a nothingburger in my opinion.<p>There’s a reason they picked an opt-out model for this, and not an opt-in approach.<p>But I also see the point in it. We recently did a hackathon, and I considered relying on Gemma 4 for privacy considerations. The local model could interpret the user’s natural language request and derive less privacy revealing requests to form based on that.<p>But then, a web app that shows people a loading screen while it downloads a 4GB model probably wouldn’t be a best-selling UX.
> You are conflating disk and memory.<p>I never conflated anything. I said it's a neglible amount of space for current hardware, which I still believe.<p>If anything, the fact that I think the amount of space is acceptable for the amount of ram a modern laptop has exaggerates the point.<p>> There’s a reason they picked an opt-out model for this, and not an opt-in approach.<p>That's the approach they take for most of their features.<p>> But then, a web app that shows people a loading screen while it downloads a 4GB model probably wouldn’t be a best-selling UX.<p>Which seems to be the motivation of having these local models embedded in the browser's available resources:
<a href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api" rel="nofollow">https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api</a>
Anyone, voluntarily installing a spy browser like Google Chrome on their devices, deserves this and much more.
Sometimes I marvel at how nice it would be to have such a narrow view of the world and other's perspectives and contexts. Life would be so much easier!
For many, it's also involuntarily installed (e.g. corporate, vendor etc).