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&#x27;t always as straightforward (especially jarring as &quot;Google services&quot; are required in Sweden on Android for stuff like mobile identity systems).

That ship has sailed on the web a long time ago.

Read the article, it&#x27;s not about that, but a mere 4GB of storage.

Don&#x27;t install chrome in the first place then

Does that include the CPU burning cat girl captchas or not?

Extra power and ram usage without your permission, for example.

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&#x27;s income.

There&#x27;s a setting in `chrome:&#x2F;&#x2F;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&#x27;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.

Maybe consent is not an appropriate term. Perhaps an acknowledgement and a way to say &quot;I don&#x27;t want this&quot; 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&#x27;t know how much they&#x27;re downloading or how much they run it, nor would I be a good judge if it&#x27;s necessary or not, but I don&#x27;t want that functionality in my browser so turned it off.

Sounds like the words of someone that doesn&#x27;t pay for their data use.Silicon Valley is not the world.

The site is currently unavailable 503 so I can&#x27;t read it. But I wonder, what should you consent to? Every dependency? Every dependency above 1GB?

Somebody&#x27;s promotion packet depended on pushing this through the approval process.

Guess what runs my PC. Tech companies just don&#x27;t understand consent.

There is a difference between- software company decides to release a new version and auto installs it for everyone who has the old version (like Google Chrome)- 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.In the first, there are no checks. In the second, there are.

This is exactly how it works on Debian. Can recommend.

Yes, which is why I use paid-for OSes and browsers, instead of free ones like Linux or Firefox. I don&#x27;t want to be the product.

Auto update is basically a root backdoor, it&#x27;s especially troublesome when you are not the customer, you are the product!

I&#x27;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.

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.

Google&#x27;s &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; motto already felt ironic over a decade ago, long before they even replaced it with &quot;do the right thing [for shareholder value?]&quot;.

I agree. This is Google doing underhanded Google-things. Why the hell would anyone trust them in the first place?

Brave origin on linux looks pretty solid now. Now I&#x27;m using that and Librewolf.

I still use Firefox. It does all I need with no ads. That&#x27;s nice.

Vivaldi - built in ad blocker, the creator is a nice guy, transparent business model. It might be rough around the edges, but it&#x27;s much better from every alternative imho.

Arc is still great on macOS (not so much the Windows build, essentially an abandoned beta) even if it&#x27;s not getting active development anymore.I&#x27;m defaulting to Firefox ever since I moved my desktop to CachyOS, but I need to either reacquaint myself with its add-on situation after a long arc of using &quot;chrome alternatives&quot;, or migrate to something else niche. Vivaldi was what I was sold on before Arc caught my attention through its wonderful UX&#x2F;UI.

Konform BrowserMullvad BrowserTor Browser for those occasions

What browsers would you recommend? I use Brave but it&#x27;s still Chromium under the hood. It&#x27;s the only one that I never had trouble with adblock though. Also lets me play youtube on mobile when my screen is locked.

You could use Chromium just for Google Meet. That&#x27;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.99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it&#x27;s worth the ~200MB of used space.

I use Chrome because at Google Meet it renders a nice separate window with mute&#x2F;unmute controls as you switch to another tab and screen share.Curious if Google plans to allow other browsers doing that too.

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.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&#x27;t mainly get adverts&#x27; money but the rest of local company ads show up well even with UBo&#x2F;BPC, so they get some money after all.On RAM usage, Librewolf it&#x27;s far lighter on the long term and it doesn&#x27;t ping back as Firefox, and many times less than Chrom* based browsers where, I repeat, Chrome based browsers don&#x27;t allow UBo any more even if installed from their Github repo enforcing some about:flags variables related to legacy extension support.The web today without UBo it&#x27;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 &gt;= 3.3&#x2F;Vulkan video card required, and no need to own a 8GB machine.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&#x27;t be used, you know for IDE&#x27;s, compilers, virtual machines&#x2F;containers and whatnot.
And, yes, I know about ZRAM under GNU&#x2F;Linux, and just imagine how many tasks would anyone accomplish with a ZRAM compressed chunk (~1&#x2F;3 of the physical RAM), a light desktop environment as Lumina&#x2F;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.

Because ladybird isn’t alpha yet, and Firefox is a mess.

They&#x27;ve been consuming 15+ years of anti-Mozilla rants anytime it or Firefox are mentioned online.It&#x27;s how you get things like &quot;Browser monocultures are an issue, so don&#x27;t use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!&quot; said in earnest.

When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can&#x27;t expect anything else from big tech.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&#x2F;Zorp&#x2F;Floop instead.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 &quot;Google gonna Google, but it&#x27;s fast at least&quot;.

I have no idea but when I mention Firefox my colleagues under 35 or so literally think I&#x27;m joking.

Yeah that&#x27;s mostly why I use it. When I try Firefox I get out of memory messages for some reason. Also the Google Lens tool is very handy and gets used often.

It&#x27;s the browser that annoys me the least. Almost everything just works.

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.

Anything webkit-based and open source like Epiphany or Konqueror&#x2F;Rekonq, it matches your &quot;moneyed corp&quot; requirement (Apple).

I don&#x27;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?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.Their funding model is a risk, but I&#x27;ve been using Firefox and librewolf forever and I&#x27;d argue it&#x27;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.

&gt; Firefox doesn’t count because they’re being funded by Google.Even if that were true, it&#x27;s still a better option _today_.

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.

Exactly my thoughts. There are so many good alternatives already, it&#x27;s insane to me that people still use this garbage. LibreWolf is a godsend

Why in the world do people keep shipping Chrome with their pseudo native applications?

Nothing says you have to use the same browser at work and outside of work? I use Edge for work, Firefox everywhere else.

Easy. You work for a company that has only whitelisted chrome or edge.

i use chrome enterprise for my personal use, which is managed via the google workspace admin.you would think google is not stupid enough to mess with gcp account holders

&gt; Blink is the most featurefulIt’s not a waste of bandwidth and disk space, it’s a feature!

&gt; Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?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&#x2F;Microsoft. Of those, Blink is the most featureful. That&#x27;s why.

Thank you. Exactly this question. Full stop.

because it&#x27;s really well developed and Just Works

Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?

it&#x27;s so absurd at this point. isn&#x27;t chrome already so much abused.

One would imagine that the model could be shared on Android and not be part of chrome. Maybe this way it’s simpler or is compatible with regulations.

Chrome is the default browser on Android.

Personally I draw the line where Chrome becomes worse than alternatives, and then I switch.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.

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.If you&#x27;re okay with 4GB being added, where would you draw a line? What if it downloaded a 40GB file? 400GB?

This is not a reasonable size for something that&#x27;s &quot;just another part of Chrome&quot;, this blows up the file size by many times

This is a bit disingenuous. If you install Chrome, you install Chrome and all it&#x27;s parts. They don&#x27;t ask your consent for individual parts because that would be absurd. If you don&#x27;t want Chrome and all its parts, don&#x27;t use it.

The universally agreed upon good is leaving the choice to use AI or not to the end user.

Thanks for reminding, it was a moment of weakness. Here is the relevant quote:&gt; the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in &lt;textarea&gt;, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus

Except these weights are barely used. Read the article.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c.tenor.com&#x2F;odyVsZbC-OYAAAAC&#x2F;tenor.gif" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c.tenor.com&#x2F;odyVsZbC-OYAAAAC&#x2F;tenor.gif</a>

I thought using local rather than cloud AI was pretty universally agreed to be good?

Netflix does not store 4gb on your drive...

The next Netflix breakout show will burn this planet to the grounds :)

You only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.

More data moves in your average playstation system update than that. Steam probably transmits  more in a morning than that

What is a lot of traffic to you?2.5 million downloads of 4 GB are 10 PB of traffic.I think there are be a lot more than 2.5 million Chrome users in the world.

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&#x27;t see that any one gigabyte of software I don&#x27;t want is especially more noteworthy than any other gigabyte of software I don&#x27;t want.An xBox game can be 50+ gigs. Millions of gamers. Fire up the presses!I&#x27;m not at all saying nothing matters so we shouldn&#x27;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&#x27;s where you want to put your energy, Sisyphus.

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 &quot;stretch&quot; then the privacy one (which could be another &quot;stretch&quot; on getting closer to 1984 scenario)

Or just tethering abroad with an esim data plan...
Just opening chrome would deplete your quota and leave you stranded.
Google you are sick!

Okay, but that&#x27;s still not an environmental disaster.

It&#x27;s somewhat known that Chrome isn&#x27;t catering to those users. They aim to deliver feature-rich experiences rather than be the de-facto browser for resource-constrained devices.

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 &quot;links&quot; for just reading really shows off how many websites just reject you for not having javascript.now I&#x27;m working on upgrading my computer lol

Your word might be of petabytes of traffic. Some people have slow lines. Some people have metered Internet subscriptions.Not everyone has access to the same infrastructure you have.

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&#x27;s probably measurable and from google&#x27;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&#x27;d also wonder about efficiency based on what proportion of end users are using AI or running it on CPU&#x2F;GPU&#x2F;NPU.

There are multiple problems here.For one, not everyone in this world lives on high bandwidth unmetered connections. In Germany, you got a lot of people still running on 16 MBit&#x2F;s ADSL, that&#x27;s half an hour worth of full load just for AI garbage. With the average 50 MBit&#x2F;s, it&#x27;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.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&#x27;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.

not just fiber, e.g. Netflix requires &quot;only&quot; (reliable) ~15Mb&#x2F;s for a 4k stream, that means most people in most countries feel little difference between ~25 Mb&#x2F;s and 1Gb&#x2F;s in their &quot;every day&quot; usage. Sure it&#x27;s a huge difference if you download a 80GiB AAA game, or preload a 4k movie. But in my experience (which definitely doesn&#x27;t apply to all countries) a lot of non tech affine people don&#x27;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.So for a lot of people paying for more then 25-50Mb&#x2F;s (pro person) makes only sense if it isn&#x27;t too costly. Hence I rarely see people going for more then 250-500 Mb&#x2F;s even iff 1Gb&#x2F;s is available and they have money. And for non-gamers with little money, I mostly see them with ~50Mb&#x2F;s (or paying for 50Mb&#x2F;s but getting much less due to old wires :( ).(Also IMHO The more important things compared to 1Gb&#x2F;s is how much of the bought bandwidth is reliably available at all times _with good latency_...)

Its unsollicited. Not everyone has fiber either

What is petabytes if not 4GB at Chrome userbase scale?

And adding climate hysteria here diminishes the climate change argument generally. It&#x27;s like &quot;the boy who cried wolf&quot;.

Amazing how many people missed the &quot;environmental disaster&quot; part of this post and are talking about personal inconvenience.Sorry folks, your low bandwidth situation is not, in fact, a climate change emergency.

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.[1] Used since forever by the Tobacco &amp; Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels &amp; Climate, Food &amp; Diet Industries.

Which ullustrates that humanity has reached such numbers that the smallest collective change has an enormous impact.

60.000.000 kg ÷ 1.000.000.000 useris about 60 gramms of co2 per user?

4Gb times 2,000,000,000 chrome installs gives us 8,000 petabytes. Are we allowed to worry now?

This is about the same as each of those people streaming a movie to their TV. There&#x27;s no there there.

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.

&gt; but lets assume 29 grams of CO2e per GB29 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?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;tools&#x2F;faqs&#x2F;faq.php?id=74&amp;t=11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;tools&#x2F;faqs&#x2F;faq.php?id=74&amp;t=11</a>Coal, the absolute worst of all, represents 18 grams over 60 full seconds to produce 1000 watts of power.

Yes and this is just the first version of this model. As if there won&#x27;t be an update (complete replacement) of the model every few months.

Other comparisons:About equal to a major iOS update at 8 GB x 1.5B.Netflix and YouTube together are perhaps around 200EB&#x2F;month.

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&#x27;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.So make your own judgement, but this seem pretty significant to me.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutchromebooks.com&#x2F;global-chrome-user-base&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutchromebooks.com&#x2F;global-chrome-user-base&#x2F;</a>
[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iea.org&#x2F;commentaries&#x2F;the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iea.org&#x2F;commentaries&#x2F;the-carbon-footprint-of-str...</a>
[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anthesisgroup.com&#x2F;insights&#x2F;what-exactly-is-1-tonne-of-co2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anthesisgroup.com&#x2F;insights&#x2F;what-exactly-is-1-ton...</a>

Agreed, my eyes rolled hard at that.  Definitely more of an F-U to users with bad connections than anything else.

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.

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.

It is sad that this terrible comment inspired so many responses. It is 4GB of traffic for one person, and I am not aware of any single person who is moving petabytes of traffic.Comparing a single person to the entire world to make the inconvenience to or violation of a single person seem small is deliberately and thoughtfully deceptive.Why not 4TB in traffic and storage for chrome, then? In a world of petabytes of traffic, it&#x27;s a feather. What&#x27;s wrong with jailing somebody wrongly for 20 years in a world where millions are jailed, many wrongly, often for lifetimes? What&#x27;s a lost finger on the job when there&#x27;s a genocide going on?

I mean, with the price of SSDs lately, 4GB is not a completely negligible addition.

framing 4 gb of data per user as 4 gb is even more of a stretch

The climate concern pearl clutching is pure muckraking. The author doesn&#x27;t care, they&#x27;re just looking for some sort of controversy. Do they (or the other seemingly horrified commenters) know how much data is transferred during a single evening of watching HD streaming video?In 2026 4GB of data is not going to have any measurable effect on the climate.There&#x27;s a level of hypocrisy involved which is truly absurd. Literally no one reading this is going to curb their data usage. They&#x27;ll just try to justify their outrage with farcical strawman arguments to be pedantic and then go binge watch some Netflix series without another thought.

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.

&gt; Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.Why not? It&#x27;s about 60 000 London - New York City flights by the way (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;ng-interactive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;jul&#x2F;19&#x2F;carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;ng-interactive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;...</a>). And what&#x27;s the benefit again?

I know it takes extra steps to make Android perform OS or app updates over LTE. I doubt it&#x27;s downloading a 4GB model over LTE unless the user has chosen to perform updates over LTE.

Should I reminder you what unlimited growth means and how it ends up in biology? Society&#x2F;technology is no exception.

If it&#x27;s emissions they worry about, then it&#x27;s anything emitting.Are they against washing machines too? Or are they just grandfathered in?

Our planet is literally dying.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]Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here&#x27;s one from Australia from this year [4], but I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;ve read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.What you&#x27;re proposing is nothing short of a death cult. It&#x27;s either degrowth or we all die, sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2026&#x2F;jan&#x2F;09&#x2F;profound-impacts-record-ocean-heat-intensifying-climate-disasters" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;2026&#x2F;jan&#x2F;09&#x2F;profound...</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41559-026-03013-5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41559-026-03013-5</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s43247-025-02299-w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s43247-025-02299-w</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unep.org&#x2F;news-and-stories&#x2F;story&#x2F;could-microbes-locked-arctic-ice-millennia-unleash-wave-deadly-diseases" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unep.org&#x2F;news-and-stories&#x2F;story&#x2F;could-microbes-l...</a>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phys.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2026-01-australia-declares-state-disaster-bushfires.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phys.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...</a>?

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.

&gt; However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has &quot;Data Saver&quot; function which should also be honored by software.Unfortunately, that automation is unreliable. It doesn&#x27;t work across operating systems - Windows laptops won&#x27;t enable data-saver mode when connected to iPhones and macOS laptops won&#x27;t when connected to Android phones, and neither will enable it when connected to, say, public transport wifi.And even if the OS has the information, websites can&#x27;t reliably use it either. Firefox and Safari both don&#x27;t implement the NetworkInformation API [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;API&#x2F;NetworkInformation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;API&#x2F;NetworkInfo...</a>

&gt; At Chrome&#x27;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.Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.&gt; 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&#x27;s data allowance, vapourised by Chrome on the user&#x27;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.THIS is a valid concern. Otherwise I&#x27;m not buying into &quot;ask for consent because of dependency X&quot;. Users don&#x27;t like questions&#x2F;consents.However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has &quot;Data Saver&quot; function which should also be honored by software.

If anything I am glad a bit of shift to local llm&#x27;s. Their gemma4 is pretty powerful for such small model so I guess that&#x27;s what they are delivering.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;vhTfm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;vhTfm</a>

Or places with collateral damage due to failures of German ISPs and state... That is many other parts of Europe while roaming... 4GB is significant cut of the roaming data allocated...

Clearly, you&#x27;ve never lived in Germany or other places that still have data caps and slow and unreliable internet connections.Yes, 4GB of unintended traffic can absolutely wreck someone&#x27;s finances.

&gt; Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered.This is satire, obviously.

Those flags will exist already, but will default to enabled in 148.That other flag is for using a different open-source inference engine to the (from what I can tell) closed-source one that&#x27;s used by default.

I&#x27;m on Chrome 147 too and disabled:&quot;optimization-guide-on-device-model&quot;- Enables optimization guide on device&quot;prompt-api-for-gemini-nano&quot;- Prompt API for Gemini Nano- Prompt API for Gemini Nano with Multimodal Inputand deleted weights.bin and the 2025.x folder in &quot;OptGuideOnDeviceModel&quot;Will report if Chrome 148 downloads the model again.

Those two (and more) exist in chrome:&#x2F;&#x2F;flags in Chrome 147. I&#x27;m disabling them now, with the expectation that will prevent the new default.One option I&#x27;m leaving as default is &quot;Use LiteRT-LM runtime for on-device model service inference.&quot; Any comment on that?

It&#x27;s based on Gemma 3n, and it&#x27;s not the best.I find it works fine for simple classification, translation, interpretation of images &amp; audio. It can write longer prose, but it&#x27;s pretty bad.It can also write text in the format of a JSON schema or regexp for anything you might want to do with structured data.

It&#x27;s not a very good small model to be honest.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.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&#x27;t do it.

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.Not happy about that as I would like to see more local models but that&#x27;s the current state of things.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sendcheckit.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;ai-powered-subject-line-alternatives" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sendcheckit.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;ai-powered-subject-line-alterna...</a>

&gt; It is a small model, so what utility can I &#x2F; Google expect from it?Precedence for shipping models alongside consumer software.Potentially without consent if it truly is a silent install.

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.

Something to do with serving more ads. My guess is they will use this to “better target” or to drain more information from you for their ads.

this is considered a large model. i think you might be surprised how many &quot;small&quot; models chrome has already pulled down on your disk.but to answer your question: one of the services that uses a small model: PermissionsAIv4&quot;&quot;&quot;
Use the Permission Predictions Service and the AIv4 model to surface permission notification requests using a quieter UI when the likelihood of the user granting the permission is predicted to be low. Requires `Make Searches and Browsing Better` to be enabled. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android
&quot;&quot;&quot;

It is a small model, so what utility can I &#x2F; Google expect from it? What is the on-board model used for?

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...)

4GB, $0.10 (whatever the HD price) that is the equivalent of a High School level intelligent brain that can perform many cognitive tasks (and in the future even PhD level intelligence) for free?Oh, the horror!!!Wait, let me pay my HVAC guy $500 he deserved because he came all the way from his home to replace a fuse

Does each playwright (or similar automation system) count as a different user, and does it keep the model around ?If yes, it&#x27;s an interesting API to call when a AI crawler hit your website.

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 every OS user on your device.

Okay, but the browser is basically the computer for most people.

And then they made the ram and ssd so expensive :)

I am curious if it reuses the LLM across all tabs, hard to imagine most machines can boot up 1-2 of any 4gb model unless its a more powerful system.

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.

You can already trigger a 2 GB model download with the Summarizer API[0], which is already shipped in Chrome.<pre><code> Summarizer.create()
</code></pre>
[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ai&#x2F;summarizer-api#model-download" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ai&#x2F;summarizer-api#model-do...</a>I think this is a distinct model from the Prompt API, since the other shipped AI APIs use fine tuned models.

This sounds perfectly reasonable. No objection from me.

Next step: Invoke the prompt API from within online ads and run a &quot;p2p&quot; AI inference provider which forwards incoming LLM queries to website visitors. :-)

Google&#x27;s updater service also currently ignores the windows 11 metered connection hint. It will gladly download that model over your cell connection even if you have a data cap.This is infuriating behavior.Silicon Valley must wake up and understand the entire world does not live like them.

I was thinking a similar thing. Many of our customers have purpose use computers that rarely see physical infrastructure internet, but need a modern browser (many chose Chrome on their own, we never recommended it).They&#x27;re going to get blasted with cellular data charges when they fire up their computer in the field.

The problem is that some of us are still on connections that charge per GB in rural areas. Here in Montana it&#x27;s very common to pay about $0.25 per GB regardless of how much you use, so this is a $1 additional cost per desktop device. Places like public school districts have hundreds of computers and this will be somewhat significant for them.

In my understanding, yes. I wrote a blog post about some of the internals here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48028662">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48028662</a>

So my understanding of that is that the download happens only when sites call the Prompt API right?Because my Chrome stable has been updated to v148 now, and I don&#x27;t see any AI models in my user profile folder. My profile size is only 328 MB, with the Code Cache subfolder occupying the most space (135 MB).

Searching about:flags for model comes up with a whole bunch:#omnibox-ml-url-scoring-model#omnibox-on-device-tail-suggestions#optimization-guide-on-device-model#text-safety-classifier#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano#writer-api-for-gemini-nano#rewriter-api-for-gemini-nano#proofreader-api-for-gemini-nano#summarizer-api-for-gemini-nano#on-device-model-litert-lm-backendThen around gemini but not caught by the search for models:
#skills (maybe? I think this is implied by &quot;gemini in chrome&quot;?)edit: I don&#x27;t see a carte blanch AI disabling option. As much as I dislike Mozilla&#x27;s growing obsession with AI, at least they give me a top level option to disable all AI stuff. I only keep Chrome around for occasional testing reasons.

It can only be called after the user has interacted with the page, but there&#x27;s no dialogue from the browser<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ai&#x2F;get-started#user-activation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ai&#x2F;get-started#user-activa...</a>

I believe webpages that use the API must request from the user via a system permissions dialogue to aces the prompt API, according the docs a few months ago.

I wrote a more detailed blog post here:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48028662">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48028662</a>

Depends on where you get it. By default the flags will be enabled, but some packagers may choose to disable them. I haven&#x27;t seen a major distro release chromium 148 yet.Weirdly though, chromium won&#x27;t be able to actually use the model even though it can download it, because the inference engine is a closed-source blob.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adsm.dev&#x2F;posts&#x2F;prompt-api&#x2F;#which-browsers-support-the-api" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adsm.dev&#x2F;posts&#x2F;prompt-api&#x2F;#which-browsers-support-th...</a>

Do you know if also Chromium has thesenfkags enabled?

Also note the Mozilla standards position on this API: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;standards-positions&#x2F;issues&#x2F;1213#issuecomment-4347988313" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;standards-positions&#x2F;issues&#x2F;1213#i...</a>Or this summary on its status:&gt; Mozilla: Opposed&gt; WebKit: Opposed&gt; Microsoft: Several concerns&gt; W3C TAG: Several concerns&gt; Developers: Mostly negativeFrom <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@jaffathecake&#x2F;116527007495775507" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@jaffathecake&#x2F;116527007495775507</a>

&#x2F;dev&#x2F;mapper&#x2F;vg_system-arch 207G 192G 4,7G 98% &#x2F;Just don&#x27;t keep free space around :-D

I think it&#x27;s great, LFG Chromium OSS

If Chrome has the #optimization-guide-on-device-model and #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano flags enabled, either because it&#x27;s part of some Origin Trial &#x2F; 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()<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ai&#x2F;prompt-api" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ai&#x2F;prompt-api</a>When Chrome 148 releases tomorrow, this will be the default behaviour on desktop.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.

For many, it&#x27;s also involuntarily installed (e.g. corporate, vendor etc).

Ironically, your comment seems to perfectly reflect the viewpoint you&#x27;re criticizing.

Sometimes I marvel at how nice it would be to have such a narrow view of the world and other&#x27;s perspectives and contexts. Life would be so much easier!

Anyone, voluntarily installing a spy browser like Google Chrome on their devices, deserves this and much more.

I&#x27;d expect them to be less cheerful about a 4GB bump than Google&#x27;s team behind Chrome

Chromium on Linux already has Google&#x27;s AI Mode in the omnibox and the new tab page, so I&#x27;m not sure Chromium would be immune to changes like local AI models.

Chromium doesn&#x27;t support this API because it needs a binary blob to run the inference, although in theory it may still be configured to download the weights:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adsm.dev&#x2F;posts&#x2F;prompt-api&#x2F;#which-browsers-support-the-api" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adsm.dev&#x2F;posts&#x2F;prompt-api&#x2F;#which-browsers-support-th...</a>

And that&#x27;s why we have, promote, and (hopefully) all use Chromium on our Linuxes.Or Firefox of course.

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&#x27;m seeing &lt;100 kB&#x2F;s download speeds for the entire system.

Can you explain what the &quot;No Gender&quot; extension is about and why it is a must?

For me the most important extension is uBlock Origin. It&#x27;s worth switching to Firefox for this alone.

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!

Extensions are a vector for vulnerabilities and malware though. Its happened many times already.

I am using Firefox for years now. It&#x27;s such a splendid experience.I can recommend the following extensions:- Youtube Enhancer- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials- Cookie Auto Decline (a MUST for Europeans)- Slop Evader- No Gender (a MUST for Germans)Its a totally different browsing experience than what most people have.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&#x27;t cost anything. Just Firefox + some free extensions.edit: because people asked about the No Gender extension:Germany didn&#x27;t have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago.Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.in regular German, it would translate to:Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.In gendered German, it became:Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.For me, it ruins the reading experience.

Please feel free to suggest a better alternative.

Yes, that one! It&#x27;s great, I can recommend it.

... that recently added a setting which allows you to entirely disable any AI enhancements? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;firefox-ai-controls#w_block-new-and-current-ai-features-single-switch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;firefox-ai-controls#w_b...</a> I mean Mozilla &#x2F; Firefox aren&#x27;t perfect but it&#x27;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.

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]?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-on-them-being-an-advertising-company-now&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-o...</a> 
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;leadership&#x2F;mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-enzor-demeo-new-ceo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;leadership&#x2F;mozillas-next...</a>

You don&#x27;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 &quot;yes&quot; and &quot;no&quot; 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.Gosh most of the time when I read people complain about firefox, it gives me the impression they have not even used firefox.

Firefox lets you disable all AI features with 1 setting switch.

The browser with a sidebar AI chatbot? What a simple solution.

What&#x27;s another 4gb of disk space when computer hardware prices are soaring into unobtanium?I hate how much companies don&#x27;t care about efficiency or their customers. It&#x27;s like windows 11 requiring like 2 more GB of RAM just to see your desktop, what an upgrade, yuck.

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.These days, I just navigate away from anything that demands I use Chrome &quot;for best results.&quot; 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&#x27;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.

Like what?I think the only time I&#x27;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.

I use Firefox as my main browser but occasionally run into Chrome requirements for certain web apps so end up begrudgingly installing it. I&#x27;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.

Isn&#x27;t waterfox owned by an ad company? Might as well be the Google of the fire fox browsers.

Switched over to Waterfox recently, nice alternative with some added extras for privacy etc.

Yea. Anyone still using chrome at this point must really love getting emails about class action lawsuits from Google. My god.

... and it takes up 50% CPU on 16 cores just to run a video call. Laptop battery drains in 30 minutes.Chrome doesn&#x27;t do that. I literally can&#x27;t use Firefox anywhere I don&#x27;t have a power socket.My laptop also becomes a toaster.

Never use “npm install”, only “npm ci”. Using “npm install” is a willing act to run fresh exploits.

that&#x27;s a willing act - you are actively asking npm to download something, and accepting it might be terrible for you.Here chrome is just installing things behind your back, whether you really want it or not.

Well,<pre><code> npm install …
</code></pre>
did worse

If only there was an orange canine coming to help us

it also installs an entire remote desktop stack on your computer without consent, and video codecs, and pdf reader... what is new here?

I feel this is great in combination with an agent like OpenClaw or Hermes.

Oh dear! Imagine all the carbon the many requests this server are using! Hoisted by their own petard…

Looks like the site&#x27;s struggling to keep up with the traffic. A couple mirror links:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20260505052217&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thatprivacyguy.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;chrome-silent-nano-install&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20260505052217&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thatp...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;sM7O5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;sM7O5</a> (missing images and styling, but the content all seems to be there)

I have to tell you something: there is consumer demand for AI.

There is consumer demand for hamburgers. There is no consumer demand for AI, hence how egregious that it also comes with negative externalities.

Both are not too consequential and downloads even more so

&gt; In this case: a single hamburger does the same amount of emissions as 50 such downloadsHamburger is usually held up as a grotesque example in climate talk and can&#x27;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.

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.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.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?

Sources for what? The pareto frontier of LLMs? How Google is pretty much on the line with most of their LLM products? Or this particular model? For the first two you need to look for size&#x2F;cost vs. accuracy charts. There are tons of them floating around. For the latter there is not much official info except what you can infer by analyzing the weights.bin file that Chrome downloads. But it does mention Gemini in there, so it seems pretty obvious that it is from their proprietary line of models.

Can you provide any sources for that? I&#x27;d like to learn more about this open frontier model.

One upside to this is that it doesn&#x27;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.

Eating the toenails is sort of like drinking the Koolade but for privacy

Man the longer all this crap goes on the more I realise Stallman was right

Better not, it&#x27;s too buggy and sluggish, it&#x27;s more in a beta stage on desktop. I&#x27;ve been using it for the last year but not anymore.

Good time to try Orion! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;orionbrowser.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;orionbrowser.com</a>

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent