If Chrome has the #optimization-guide-on-device-model and #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano 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()
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.
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't do it.
"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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
EDIT2: of course supports firefox extensions as well, perfect.
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 still remember "oh my friend's iphone has a nice camera, how can I send myself that picture he took with bluetooth?" and being... a bit surprised that it wasn't really possible.
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)
... Mozilla absolutely did this to themselves. Come think of it, they really remind me of what Microsift's been doing with Windows.
When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can'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/Zorp/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 "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
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 grateful that we are being stalked so we can be targetted for sales purposes.
--------
[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…
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.
In my recent experience: definitely yes, though not significantly worse. Unless you have [many] hundreds of tabs open (which I do as I have neither executive function nor organisational skills), or have a machine with very limited RAM, I don't think you'll notice a difference.
This is anecdata, of course, take with a pinch of your preferred flavouring powder.
> Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.
Thats good to know, but I am a "out of the box" person. I never want to have to manually install extensions as thats just more stuff to remember when setting up a new machine. Yea thats a me problem, but still.
It used to support it out-of-the-box as well, but it's technically against YouTube's ToS to allow this without paying for a premium, so now you need this as an extra hoop.
Wouldn't know, as I have never been in charge of one, but I imagine Google having the power to make your browser completely irrelevant would be a pretty strong incentive.
I used ublock origin for a while, but I kept having issues with it on Youtube due to Youtubes anti adblock measurements. Brave for some reason always had a fix for it pretty quickly, so I never experienced these issues with it. Maybe I could try a different browser again on my next machine.
In iOS kinda yes; you have to request desktop version, and once you activate the lock screen for the first time you have to press “play”. Then it just plays and auto plays in the background.
Don’t know about android, but there is also an extension there that blocks the visibility page api for YouTube.
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.
It helps if you're doing mundane things and want to help people who need to mix their sensitive traffic with it.
More people "legitimately" using Tor makes it less likely to have its exit nodes outright blocked, as well, and assuming all traffic from them is malicious.
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.
99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
This isn't particularly relevant to whether you should use it right now though. If there's a restaurant I like but it might go out of business in a year I don't stop eating there today.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Q: Does <company> understand consent?
A: No / Maybe Later
but the Google version is:
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?
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.
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.
So make your own judgement, but this seem pretty significant to me.
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.
An xBox game can be 50+ gigs. Millions of gamers. Fire up the presses!
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.
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.
I definitely trust Google's team (and large trillion dollar companies with sufficient resources to do this) to make reasonable choices for their users... said, perhaps, someone ever? Certainly not me.
(I wanted to write something far snarkier and sarcastic but getting annoyed at google is like getting annoyed at a lawnmower/Oracle. That plus HN guidelines.)
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 only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.
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/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.
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.
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.
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.
why would they be fined for this? In fact a local LLM is exactly the opposite direction of a privacy concern. The local LLM gives an answer generated locally and never uploaded to a server.
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).
This is so absurd... I have to keep an old (rooted in order to hide that adb is enabled) phone connected to my home server just to use such app, because grapheneos without google services is apparently not secure enough.
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?
Do I look like law enforcement? I don't have to do innocent until proven guilty.
It's the tech company's problem to convince me they are trying to do something useful to me. Come to think of it, it's their problem to convince me they still understand "useful to the customer" first.
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.
> 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]
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].
> 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
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.
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
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.
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.
However, that's not 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.
As others have pointed out, the solution is https://www.firefox.com/. 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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/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.
All Gemini models sit around the frontier, especially if you go to smaller sizes. Google is actually more invested into efficiency than size unlike some of the other big providers.
Sources for your claim that the model being downloaded to Android/Chrome is Gemini instead of Gemma. Other than downloading the bin file myself and analyzing it lol.
Thanks. Looks like the current Gemini Nano is actually a separate model with the Gemma 3n architecture that has been distilled from Gemini 2.5 Flash[1].
Also, the next version of Gemini Nano will be based directly on Gemma 4 (so not distilled, not Gemini at all except for the name)[2].
So no, it's not a frontier model. Those don't run on your phone or in your browser.
Javascript running on a page can use a feature that requires a model to be downloaded.
I have pages that use it, or other LLM models via LiteRT or HuggingFace transformers.js.
I try to warn the user, but that is my responsibility as a page author. I like that this is enabling the web platform to remain competitive.
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.
4GB isn't nothing, but if a page wants to use it then hopefully it is useful to the user!
> 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.
Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.
> 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.
THIS is a valid concern. Otherwise I'm not buying into "ask for consent because of dependency X". Users don't like questions/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 "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.
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.
No need for unlimited growth, just normal sustainable progress like the one that allows you and me to communicate here after centuries of technological progress.
The "normal sustainable progress" has already pushed us to the brink of extinction. AI is rapidly accelerating our resource use, with nothing good to show for it.
How exactly are we "on the brink of extinction"? ("We" as in humans; many other species are obviously not as lucky.)
We are probably on the brink of very bad consequences for a signification fraction of all humans (up to and including all of them, to some extent), which is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.
But what do you gain by incorrectly labeling that as "extinction"? Because you do definitely lose credibility for it, similarly to everybody using hyperbolic language such as "boiling the oceans" etc.
This is literally why the EU mandates appliance energy efficiency.
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.
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".
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'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.
What you're proposing is nothing short of a death cult. It's either degrowth or we all die, sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.
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.
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.
Because capitalism ties together better lives an ideological belief in unbounded growth.
Will people's lives really be better once they're drowning or choking on wildfire smoke? But hey, at least they had cheap junk!
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.
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.
This is my issue. A cost/benefit analysis, not a strict no to progress.
Have you ever made a decision to NOT download something, turn on your computer, experiment, etc based on your perceived impact on the planet?
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.
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.
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.
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].
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?
>Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent.
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...
>At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.
sigh.
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.
Oh and it might have an AI component in it.
This claim is worse than the AI in data centers boiling the earth claims.
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 some 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.
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.
Thanks for reminding, it was a moment of weakness. Here is the relevant quote:
> 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.
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?
> In this case: a single hamburger does the same amount of emissions as 50 such downloads
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I am using Firefox for years now. It'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't cost anything. Just Firefox + some free extensions.
edit: because people asked about the No Gender extension:
Germany didn'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.
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.
Sites that autoplay a video, which follows you as you scroll are the worst.
I like the Unhooked extension. You can select which parts of YouTube you want to remove (e. g. Shorts). My start page is empty, I need to visit the channel pages to watch their videos.
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.
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.
To prevent accusations of "masculinism" or sexism and to have a stronger case on having the goal to improve readability the add-on could include an option (or even make it default) to replace by generic feminine instead.
The times where you have to try to appease small but vocal perpetually outraged groups are over. The German language has no generic feminine so adding it to the extension would contradict its goal.
> The times where you have to try to appease small but vocal perpetually outraged groups are over.
Zwei Punkte: erstens, nein, such times are never over. Only thing that changes is who is outraged and by what.
Zweitens, you're a demonstration of this right now by caring. To be clear, I'm not criticising you for this, you're allowed to care about stuff, but you're literally promoting an extension that rewrites someone else's word choice because you don't like it. Es ist dasselbe, und ist gründlich no different to how English Sprachbewahrer complain about the split infinitive in Star Trek's "to boldly go" or common use of the phrase "very unique" (unique means one-of-a-kind, how can you be "very" that?)
> The German language has no generic feminine so adding it to the extension would contradict its goal.
Die deutsche Sprache ist keine constructed language like Esperanto, whose rules come from a book, it's a natural language whose rules are discovered by observing those using it. As people change what they say and how they say it, so too does language change over time.
The German language is what those using it, do. On the basis of the political adverts I see around here, this includes the conservative CDU borrowing die englische Phrase „Made in Germany“: https://www.cdu.de/aktuelles/cdu-deutschlands/mainzer-erklae...
The goal as stated on the extension page is to improve the readability of texts by replacing :, *, _ forms. So some customizability to the user's wishes would be quite nice.
My calculus textbook (Königsberger, 2004) in university used alternating generic masculine and feminine in its exercises, which I found a delightful use of language.
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
Lehrer being explicitly male
and Lehrer:innen being explicitly inclusive?
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.
(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.
So since my youth, multiple proposal have been put forward, among which the gender-star. Lehrer -> Lehrer*innen, Lehrer:innen.
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.
In my mind, its the ultimate form of virtue signalling :-)
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.
> you would lose meaning
No meaning is lost that has not been there before.
> someone else's use of language awkward
Most would judge that it's not just awkward, but grating.
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?
Possible forms of inclusive speech: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen
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).
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).
Thanks - that's really interesting, in a weird-interesting way.
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.
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.
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.
Gosh most of the time when I read people complain about firefox, it gives me the impression they have not even used firefox.
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?
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]?
... that recently added a setting which allows you to entirely disable any AI enhancements? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-ai-controls#w_b... 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.
> 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.
> The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
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.
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.
If you're using a computer from any time in the past 20 years or so it's probably capable of multitasking so you can open another browser to pay your bills in the meantime.
I'll give myself as an example, between writing that first comment and replying to you, I downloaded and built ladybird on MacOS - it took 25 minutes, most of which was me fixing build dependencies - and here I am replying to you from an alternative browser. Text navigation is a little weird and text boxes are weird, but so far it works.
Of course, if building in the background is more effort than you're willing/able to expend, then continue using Chrome or Firefox until others finish the alternative, and then decide if the time required to download, install and get used to a packaged browser is also going to be a hindrance to you paying your bills.
There are Firefox forks that don't have any AI/advertising/etc. stuff in it.
There's also WebKit-based FOSS browsers not based on Chromium nor Gecko. Upstream it's maintained by Apple but the open source webkit browsers should not have any questionable features by default.
Doing LLM locally is more climate efficient than doing in datacenters
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
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...
https://archive.ph/vhTfm
If Chrome has the #optimization-guide-on-device-model and #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano 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()
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api
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.
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.
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't do it.
It's based on Gemma 3n, and it's not the best.
I find it works fine for simple classification, translation, interpretation of images & audio. It can write longer prose, but it'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.
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.
One option I'm leaving as default is "Use LiteRT-LM runtime for on-device model service inference." Any comment on that?
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's used by default.
"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.
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"
You're not even the customer when it comes to Google.
I was not happy when they added Gemini to the top bar, in its own place that nothing else gets to use.
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.
They've been consuming 15+ years of anti-Mozilla rants anytime it or Firefox are mentioned online.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
EDIT2: of course supports firefox extensions as well, perfect.
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.
Hello fellow extraterrestrial
Old heads checking in... Back in my day, we had an exposed file hierarchy and we liked it!
I still remember "oh my friend's iphone has a nice camera, how can I send myself that picture he took with bluetooth?" and being... a bit surprised that it wasn't really possible.
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)
... Mozilla absolutely did this to themselves. Come think of it, they really remind me of what Microsift's been doing with Windows.
When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can'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/Zorp/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 "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
Mozilla is nice enough to let you opt out.
I'm in my 40s I have no desire for this new technology unless we get the kind of AI from Japanese anime.
> When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech.
Because this is something expected from Google. Google has never committed to security, but Mozilla did.
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 grateful that we are being stalked so we can be targetted for sales purposes.
--------
[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…
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.
…and Chromium under the hood.
Firefox.
is it as greedy as chrome for the ram?
In my recent experience: definitely yes, though not significantly worse. Unless you have [many] hundreds of tabs open (which I do as I have neither executive function nor organisational skills), or have a machine with very limited RAM, I don't think you'll notice a difference.
This is anecdata, of course, take with a pinch of your preferred flavouring powder.
Yes: https://www.phoronix.com/review/firefox-chrome-2026/4
> Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.
Does it allow me to play youtube on locked screen on mobile?
Yes, actually!
Well, it does require you to install an extension[0], but it can be done.
[0]: <https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play>
Thats good to know, but I am a "out of the box" person. I never want to have to manually install extensions as thats just more stuff to remember when setting up a new machine. Yea thats a me problem, but still.
It used to support it out-of-the-box as well, but it's technically against YouTube's ToS to allow this without paying for a premium, so now you need this as an extra hoop.
Why should a browser be policing YouTube’s ToS for them?
Wouldn't know, as I have never been in charge of one, but I imagine Google having the power to make your browser completely irrelevant would be a pretty strong incentive.
You want to have your cake and eat it too, I think the best solution in your case is paying for youtube
Or I just keep using brave and not pay for the biggest media corpo that just passed Disney in revenue.
It allows you to play youtube without ads with ublock origin.
I used ublock origin for a while, but I kept having issues with it on Youtube due to Youtubes anti adblock measurements. Brave for some reason always had a fix for it pretty quickly, so I never experienced these issues with it. Maybe I could try a different browser again on my next machine.
In iOS kinda yes; you have to request desktop version, and once you activate the lock screen for the first time you have to press “play”. Then it just plays and auto plays in the background.
Don’t know about android, but there is also an extension there that blocks the visibility page api for YouTube.
Yes. That's the primary reason I use it, but you have to install an extension called "Video Background Play Fix".
Tubular app does, and it blocks ads
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.
That made me avoid it for a long time but there hasn't been more concerning behavior since, so some point, we can move on.
Did they ever address it? It's still the same company with presumably the same ideals. I was using it daily at the time, maybe it's better now.
Brave is a series scam company. Always has been, always will be.
I just checked it out, but it removes Tor access? It would pretty much downgrade the regular browser
I think using tor in brave just makes you stand out more - stock tor browser is probably a better setup. Whonix even better.
It helps if you're doing mundane things and want to help people who need to mix their sensitive traffic with it.
More people "legitimately" using Tor makes it less likely to have its exit nodes outright blocked, as well, and assuming all traffic from them is malicious.
That's charitable, but even then you probably want to avoid fingerprinting...
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.
This one looks neat, is it also based on Chromium?
Yes.
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
I agree. This is Google doing underhanded Google-things. Why the hell would anyone trust them in the first place?
Why in the world do people keep shipping Chrome with their pseudo native applications?
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.
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.
99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.
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?
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'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.
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).
It's the browser that annoys me the least. Almost everything just works.
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.
From a funding standpoint there’s no future to Firefox. They will get brought Mozilla foundation is an investment fund now. Firefox it dead weight.
This isn't particularly relevant to whether you should use it right now though. If there's a restaurant I like but it might go out of business in a year I don't stop eating there today.
Firefox is open source :)
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
Ublock origin works perfectly fine on Edge. With Firefox I've also had ram usage that was multiples of what I get with Edge, on both Linux and Windows
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!
This is exactly how it works on Debian. Can recommend.
Guess what runs my PC. Tech companies just don't understand consent.
It is almost the standard:
but the Google version is:> ... don't understand consent.
The word you're looking for is "respect". They understand consent, the same as JBS* understands animal rights.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_N.V.
I use brave. Firefox doesn't work in my qemu VM with (none pass through) hardware acceleration, it just crashes the VM.
Brave has always just worked for me and seems light on memory usage. Dunno why anyone would use chrome.
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.
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.
So make your own judgement, but this seem pretty significant to me.
[1]: https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/global-chrome-user-base/ [2]: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str... [3]: https://www.anthesisgroup.com/insights/what-exactly-is-1-ton...
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.
An xBox game can be 50+ gigs. Millions of gamers. Fire up the presses!
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.
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.
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.
Or just tethering abroad with an esim data plan... Just opening chrome would deplete your quota and leave you stranded. Google you are sick!
Surely it will wait when the connection is marked as metered.
I definitely trust Google's team (and large trillion dollar companies with sufficient resources to do this) to make reasonable choices for their users... said, perhaps, someone ever? Certainly not me.
(I wanted to write something far snarkier and sarcastic but getting annoyed at google is like getting annoyed at a lawnmower/Oracle. That plus HN guidelines.)
Okay, but that's still not an environmental disaster.
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.
More data moves in your average playstation system update than that. Steam probably transmits more in a morning than that
There are far more Google Chrome users than probably PlayStation & Steam users combined.
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.
I don't think anyone expects a browser to suddenly download 4GB, let alone behind their backs!
You only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.
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 only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.
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.
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 estimate more or less than 2.5 million?
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.
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.
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 & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.
Agreed, my eyes rolled hard at that. Definitely more of an F-U to users with bad connections than anything else.
Amazing how many people missed the "environmental disaster" part of this post and are talking about personal inconvenience.
Sorry folks, your low bandwidth situation is not, in fact, a climate change emergency.
4Gb times 2,000,000,000 chrome installs gives us 8,000 petabytes. Are we allowed to worry now?
60.000.000 kg ÷ 1.000.000.000 user
is about 60 gramms of co2 per user?
Which ullustrates that humanity has reached such numbers that the smallest collective change has an enormous impact.
How do you propose maintaining the living conditions you've become accustomed to without the system we have currently, as shit as it is?
There’s the problem: we want change without giving up the things we’re accustomed to. We’re locked in.
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/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.
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.
The next Netflix breakout show will burn this planet to the grounds :)
Netflix does not store 4gb on your drive...
It does if it triggers this download.
What is petabytes if not 4GB at Chrome userbase scale?
Its unsollicited. Not everyone has fiber either
And that will be 4GB per chrome instance I assume? (not profiles, instances) And what happens with each electron app if it uses chrome?
languagemodel should be an OS service..
Looks like the site's struggling to keep up with the traffic. A couple mirror links:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatp...
https://archive.ph/sM7O5 (missing images and styling, but the content all seems to be there)
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.
And that's why we have, promote, and (hopefully) all use Chromium on our Linuxes.
Or Firefox of course.
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.
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.
why would they be fined for this? In fact a local LLM is exactly the opposite direction of a privacy concern. The local LLM gives an answer generated locally and never uploaded to a server.
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).
This is so absurd... I have to keep an old (rooted in order to hide that adb is enabled) phone connected to my home server just to use such app, because grapheneos without google services is apparently not secure enough.
Does that include the CPU burning cat girl captchas or not?
Hello iOS upgrade.
Don't install chrome in the first place then
I'm logged in to work in Chrome and to personal stuff in Firefox :)
Read the article, it's not about that, but a mere 4GB of storage.
4GB of storage is not a “mere” thing, to the contrary.
It is in 2026. Average daily household usage is at ~25gig. That's average, so 50% are more than that
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?
I don’t. Do you have any actual evidence they’re doing that beyond the vibe?
Do I look like law enforcement? I don't have to do innocent until proven guilty.
It's the tech company's problem to convince me they are trying to do something useful to me. Come to think of it, it's their problem to convince me they still understand "useful to the customer" first.
That ship has sailed on the web a long time ago.
Somebody's promotion packet depended on pushing this through the approval process.
Man the longer all this crap goes on the more I realise Stallman was right
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.
> 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]
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].
> 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
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.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10793
4gb isn't really a negligible amount, given the amount of desktops and laptops sold with just a 256gb ssd
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
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.
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.
However, that's not 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.
As others have pointed out, the solution is https://www.firefox.com/. 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Can you provide any sources for that? I'd like to learn more about this open frontier model.
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/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.
Just because it's called Gemini doesn't mean that it's somehow automatically as comparable with the frontier of small models as well, does it?
All Gemini models sit around the frontier, especially if you go to smaller sizes. Google is actually more invested into efficiency than size unlike some of the other big providers.
Do you have any benchmark details on the on-device Gemini models? I haven't found a lot of public information on these.
Sources for your claim that the model being downloaded to Android/Chrome is Gemini instead of Gemma. Other than downloading the bin file myself and analyzing it lol.
How about Google itself?
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api
>With the Prompt API, you can send natural language requests to Gemini Nano in the browser.
Thanks. Looks like the current Gemini Nano is actually a separate model with the Gemma 3n architecture that has been distilled from Gemini 2.5 Flash[1].
Also, the next version of Gemini Nano will be based directly on Gemma 4 (so not distilled, not Gemini at all except for the name)[2].
So no, it's not a frontier model. Those don't run on your phone or in your browser.
[1]: https://developer.android.com/blog/posts/ml-kit-s-prompt-api...
[2]: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/04/AI-Core-De...
I think this is a bad framing.
Javascript running on a page can use a feature that requires a model to be downloaded.
I have pages that use it, or other LLM models via LiteRT or HuggingFace transformers.js.
I try to warn the user, but that is my responsibility as a page author. I like that this is enabling the web platform to remain competitive.
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.
4GB isn't nothing, but if a page wants to use it then hopefully it is useful to the user!
> 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.
Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.
> 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.
THIS is a valid concern. Otherwise I'm not buying into "ask for consent because of dependency X". Users don't like questions/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 "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.
> Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.
Why not? It's about 60 000 London - New York City flights by the way (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...). 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.
No need for unlimited growth, just normal sustainable progress like the one that allows you and me to communicate here after centuries of technological progress.
Ah yes, sustainable progress, like we're doing now?
The "normal sustainable progress" has already pushed us to the brink of extinction. AI is rapidly accelerating our resource use, with nothing good to show for it.
How exactly are we "on the brink of extinction"? ("We" as in humans; many other species are obviously not as lucky.)
We are probably on the brink of very bad consequences for a signification fraction of all humans (up to and including all of them, to some extent), which is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.
But what do you gain by incorrectly labeling that as "extinction"? Because you do definitely lose credibility for it, similarly to everybody using hyperbolic language such as "boiling the oceans" etc.
If it's emissions they worry about, then it's anything emitting.
Are they against washing machines too? Or are they just grandfathered in?
This is literally why the EU mandates appliance energy efficiency.
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.
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.
Are we back to magic water and magic soil? Does the energy have some morality attached to it?
The emissions per kWh of energy used in providing internet downloads probably is similar to that per kWh of energy used for washing clothes.
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'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.
What you're proposing is nothing short of a death cult. It's either degrowth or we all die, sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...
[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...?
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.
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.
Because capitalism ties together better lives an ideological belief in unbounded growth.
Will people's lives really be better once they're drowning or choking on wildfire smoke? But hey, at least they had cheap junk!
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.
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.
This is my issue. A cost/benefit analysis, not a strict no to progress.
Have you ever made a decision to NOT download something, turn on your computer, experiment, etc based on your perceived impact on the planet?
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.
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.
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.
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].
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...
I feel this is great in combination with an agent like OpenClaw or Hermes.
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!
Good time to try Orion! https://orionbrowser.com
Better not, it's too buggy and sluggish, it's more in a beta stage on desktop. I've been using it for the last year but not anymore.
Well,
did worsethat'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.
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.
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?
Google abuses users.
You can also ask why the US government fails to protect the users. Corporate dictatorship at its finest.
>Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent.
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...
>At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.
sigh.
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.
Oh and it might have an AI component in it.
This claim is worse than the AI in data centers boiling the earth claims.
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 some 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.
it's so absurd at this point. isn't chrome already so much abused.
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.
it also installs an entire remote desktop stack on your computer without consent, and video codecs, and pdf reader... what is new here?
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:
> 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.
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?
> In this case: a single hamburger does the same amount of emissions as 50 such downloads
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.
I have to tell you something: there is consumer demand for AI.
We'll never know, since companies seem determined to make it non-optional.
I for one would love to see someone try and shove hamburgers down everybody's throats in order to increase consumer demand.
I can't read the article (503) but does anyone know why someone calling themselves thatprivacyguy is installing Google Chrome?
Maybe in order to document a privacy problem with it that they heard about.
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.
If only there was an orange canine coming to help us
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.
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.
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.
Chrome is the default browser on Android.
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.
[flagged]
Yea. Anyone still using chrome at this point must really love getting emails about class action lawsuits from Google. My god.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
It's frustrating.
I am using Firefox for years now. It'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't cost anything. Just Firefox + some free extensions.
edit: because people asked about the No Gender extension:
Germany didn'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.
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.
Sites that autoplay a video, which follows you as you scroll are the worst.
I like the Unhooked extension. You can select which parts of YouTube you want to remove (e. g. Shorts). My start page is empty, I need to visit the channel pages to watch their videos.
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.
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.
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.
Chrome does this split-screen. Web browsers are operating systems, for all intents & purposes.
Ask any Emacs evangelist.
I love my emacs brothers and sisters but yea. If you are running docker emacs and a web browser you basically have 4 OSs running at the same time
Can you explain what the "No Gender" extension is about and why it is a must?
It removes gender speech (Leser*innen becomes Leser), 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.
To prevent accusations of "masculinism" or sexism and to have a stronger case on having the goal to improve readability the add-on could include an option (or even make it default) to replace by generic feminine instead.
The times where you have to try to appease small but vocal perpetually outraged groups are over. The German language has no generic feminine so adding it to the extension would contradict its goal.
> The times where you have to try to appease small but vocal perpetually outraged groups are over.
Zwei Punkte: erstens, nein, such times are never over. Only thing that changes is who is outraged and by what.
Zweitens, you're a demonstration of this right now by caring. To be clear, I'm not criticising you for this, you're allowed to care about stuff, but you're literally promoting an extension that rewrites someone else's word choice because you don't like it. Es ist dasselbe, und ist gründlich no different to how English Sprachbewahrer complain about the split infinitive in Star Trek's "to boldly go" or common use of the phrase "very unique" (unique means one-of-a-kind, how can you be "very" that?)
> The German language has no generic feminine so adding it to the extension would contradict its goal.
Die deutsche Sprache ist keine constructed language like Esperanto, whose rules come from a book, it's a natural language whose rules are discovered by observing those using it. As people change what they say and how they say it, so too does language change over time.
The German language is what those using it, do. On the basis of the political adverts I see around here, this includes the conservative CDU borrowing die englische Phrase „Made in Germany“: https://www.cdu.de/aktuelles/cdu-deutschlands/mainzer-erklae...
The goal as stated on the extension page is to improve the readability of texts by replacing :, *, _ forms. So some customizability to the user's wishes would be quite nice.
My calculus textbook (Königsberger, 2004) in university used alternating generic masculine and feminine in its exercises, which I found a delightful use of language.
Germany didn't have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago. It’s a terrible reading experience and super annoying.
Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.
it was
Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.
and it became:
Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.
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
Lehrer being explicitly male and Lehrer:innen being explicitly inclusive?
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.
As a German, you don’t really loose any information. it was introduced somewhere in the 2020s and is not (yet) standardized - and probably wont be.
We Germans know that the generic masculine includes both genders by default. It’s how we use the language.
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.
(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.
So since my youth, multiple proposal have been put forward, among which the gender-star. Lehrer -> Lehrer*innen, Lehrer:innen.
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.
In my mind, its the ultimate form of virtue signalling :-)
but hey. to each their own. I just prefer to ignore it if possible
It was definitely introduced before that point, I saw people complaining about it back in 2018 when I arrived in the country.
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.
> you would lose meaning
No meaning is lost that has not been there before.
> someone else's use of language awkward
Most would judge that it's not just awkward, but grating.
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
In German: Leser (masculine)
Possible forms of inclusive speech: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen
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).
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_star
Thanks - that's really interesting, in a weird-interesting way.
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.
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.
- Ublock origin - decentraleyes
Extensions are a vector for vulnerabilities and malware though. Its happened many times already.
Computers are a vector for vulnerabilities and malware. We must all stop using them.
Switched over to Waterfox recently, nice alternative with some added extras for privacy etc.
Isn't waterfox owned by an ad company? Might as well be the Google of the fire fox browsers.
No
https://www.waterfox.com/blog/15-years-of-forking/
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.
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.
If you accidentally skipped it, go to Preferences -> AI Controls -> toggle on Block AI Enhancements, it disables everything.
He’s not saying he accidentally skipped the prompt, he’s saying he didn’t get any.
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?
ff doesn't download models unless you so opt in.
Firefox lets you disable all AI features with 1 setting switch.
LibreWolf.
[flagged]
We've banned this account.
... and it takes up 50% CPU on 16 cores just to run a video call. Laptop battery drains in 30 minutes.
Chrome doesn't do that. I literally can't use Firefox anywhere I don't have a power socket.
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]?
[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-o... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
Yes, that one! It's great, I can recommend it.
... that recently added a setting which allows you to entirely disable any AI enhancements? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-ai-controls#w_b... 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.
https://zen-browser.app/
it's just arc-browser repackaged, isn't it?
While it is certainly inspired by Arc, it doesn't share any code. Arc is proprietary and Chromium-based, Zen is Open Source and Firefox-based.
It is not. It is Firefox but with an Arc-like workflow.
Not being able to suggest an alternative for Chrome doesn't imply that Firefox is a good alternative.
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.
> The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
Context is definitely interesting to have with your statement (From https://grapheneos.org/usage).
Firefox _is_ a good alternative to chrome, though, by the arguments OP brought. What OP complained about are even worse in chrome.
FF is largely funded by google money? Chrome _is_ google.
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).
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.
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.
https://ladybird.org/
Where's the download link?
git clone https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird.git cd ladybird ./Meta/ladybird.py run
If you can, run it, report issues and help them develop it.
Wonderful. My unpaid bills will be so happy waiting for that to complete.
If you're using a computer from any time in the past 20 years or so it's probably capable of multitasking so you can open another browser to pay your bills in the meantime.
I'll give myself as an example, between writing that first comment and replying to you, I downloaded and built ladybird on MacOS - it took 25 minutes, most of which was me fixing build dependencies - and here I am replying to you from an alternative browser. Text navigation is a little weird and text boxes are weird, but so far it works.
Of course, if building in the background is more effort than you're willing/able to expend, then continue using Chrome or Firefox until others finish the alternative, and then decide if the time required to download, install and get used to a packaged browser is also going to be a hindrance to you paying your bills.
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.
Just uBlock Origin pre-installed
https://helium.computer/
FWIW I've recently moved from Firefox to Helium after 10+ years.
Yes, I hate that it's also Chromium, but no, there aren't real alternatives.
There are Firefox forks that don't have any AI/advertising/etc. stuff in it.
There's also WebKit-based FOSS browsers not based on Chromium nor Gecko. Upstream it's maintained by Apple but the open source webkit browsers should not have any questionable features by default.
We Should Improve Society Somewhat
Why is this downvoted lol. It's so reasonable
"Oh but the climate costs" Who cares?
Doing LLM locally is more climate efficient than doing in datacenters
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
You should have finished reading the article. Stop being lazy and binary-minded.
> 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.
Clearly, you'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's finances.
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...
Anyone, voluntarily installing a spy browser like Google Chrome on their devices, deserves this and much more.
For many, it's also involuntarily installed (e.g. corporate, vendor etc).