It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of. Reminds me a bit of back when installing software was a minefield due to all of the integrated "promotions" for things like toolbars, only now they've vertically integrated the unwanted software, cutting out the middleman.
Honestly, for most features you could justifiably say its fine. I mean honestly, how large is an English dictionary? 100 KiB? That is a far cry from 4 GiB. Just taking up 4 GiB of disk space without even asking is indeed a shit move no matter how you shake it. If Microsoft Word updated and suddenly took up 4 GiB more for something like a dictionary, it might not cause as much uproar as if it were something that many people are tired of hearing about and not interested in, but I'm not sure you would find a single soul who would find that acceptable, more just tolerated, probably partly because a lot of people simply wouldn't know better.
> It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of
You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era. And think of the Web - how many gigabytes of terrible adtech and tracking code does the average user download in a month of web browsing without an adblocker? Remember, each one probably packages in a couple hundred NPM dependencies into its bundle.
I don't have even a single use for Siri on my Mac. It's useless AND redundant with the Siri that I have to have on my phone, yet Apple downloaded and installed "Siri" on there. If I install GarageBand which is the only first-party way to do basic audio manipulation, Apple installs at least 4GB of audio samples on my Mac.
None of this is to say "I approve of this exact thing Google is doing" - just that I agree with GP that this is exactly the same as what every big company (and many small ones) do every day.
The only "consent" we ever get is basically the all-or-nothing EULA we have to click Agree to in order to log in for the first time - the relevant terms are "Want computer? Accept that we will be shipping you all kinds of code constantly, for 'reasons.'"
The problem here is that the on-device model is old news packed as clickbait without any research beyond his file system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48034889 And all news outlets spreading it w/o any further research of their own.
Policy GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings disables and removes the local model without any flag hacks since 2024. In Canary since January behind Settings > System > On-device AI
The article doesn't mention Chrome version, release channel, whether on fresh vs existing install an if settings were altered.
> The article doesn't mention Chrome version, release channel, whether on fresh vs existing install an if settings were altered.
Actually, it does claim this is the stable release channel. And it's reasonable to assume that if the author is documenting on a fresh profile / user account on the Mac, they probably downloaded the current (that day) release, though we're inferring when don't don't truly know for sure.
> 10. Code-signed, shipped through the normal release channel. This is not test build behaviour. It is Chrome stable.
I think it's poor form to run cover for one of the biggest corporations in the world like this. Don't let them off the hook. As the author correctly points out, metered connections are being abused. Hell, last month I somehow hit ATT's bandwidth limits on my mobile and got throttled for five days. It made my phone so unusable that I turned on hotspot on my work phone and connected to that over wifi when I went to lunch.
Yep. The fact that it is being hand waved away in this manner as if it was a valid argument is beyond maddening. I am starting to wonder if the move behind land and 'extreme personalization' of software is a fad I thought it was ( I mean, yeah regular users won't, but there is no helping some people if they don't want to be helped ).
I had a client complain that some software we recommended installed a database. How fucking dare we install this giant blob of software without his consent! It was MySQL, and integral to the application.
So what's your solution? A click-through acceptance of every single library, component, dependency, etc. every app uses?
P.S. - out here in the real world of the people who just use software, they don't want this. Which is its own problem, because they should care more than they do, but we play the hand we're delt.
That's going to the opposite extreme. Making major components optional and including some basic information about what they are at install time is easy to do. It's very common with creative software and even some games.
I think this will be increasingly true in this extended period of more expensive memory and storage media. The Macbook Neo, for example, has 250GB onboard storage and 8gb memory. Many users will not want to spend 2% of their storage and allocate half their memory just to run a web browser.
I agree that the disk usage we're discussing here is especially painful on that hardware, but:
> "just to run a web browser"
I don't even mean to be hyperbolic here, but 'running a web browser' is almost the only purpose of a MacBook Neo for at least 90% of its target audience.
Consider what normal people do on a laptop:
- Email - web browser
- Social media - web browser
- pay bills, research, book trips - web browser
- watch video content - web browser
For many users, you could hide the Dock and just autolaunch Chrome at Startup and it wouldn't have any negative impact on them.
And I'd bet that any browser with more than 5 tabs open, especially without an adblocker, is using whatever portion of its paltry 8GB of RAM that the OS hasn't hogged. So the argument to be made for allowing some feature bloat (and paying the space cost) in a browser is that this is probably the app most people will spend 75-100% of their time in anyway.
Running a web browser _with a local AI model_ is likely something that most users are not aiming for. This is extra disk and bandwidth for something that benefits Google but does nothing for the average user.
I think it's the same extreme, it just shows up in different places, but fair enough. Both views are problematic.
Making major components optional
"I don't want no steenkin DB installed!". Unclick box...app doesn't work right, and now it's the vendors fault, and the vendor has to spend the time to explain to the (possibly non- or even anti-technical) user why. And the user will be on social media complaining about you.
Now, if you want some more extreme thinking, you in theory might never need to develop with a DB; you can just explicitly code all data handling in the app. There you go...no complaints about superfluous installs. Does any developer want to do that? Probably not; DBs are pretty nice abstractions for data handling.
And that's how the AI model here will be justified: this is how apps are built now, accept it or don't use the app. True or not, that'll be the party line.
including some basic information about what they are at install time is easy to do
Easy to do; hard to support. Now you're dealing with "I don't even know what a database is, much less do I want it or not" and you're doing tech support again. And the user will be on social media complaining about you.
Of course, the assumption that most users pay any attention at all to the instructions, disclosures and T&Cs of their software is almost comically quaint. Click, click, click, install.
I think this will be increasingly true in this extended period of more expensive memory and storage media.
This is by no means the first (or, yet AFAIK, worst) shortage of computer components. In the previous ones, I recall noone who said "I won't upgrade to the latest, more bloated version of MYReallyImportantApp because I don't have enough disk/memory/cpu". They delete a less important app, or accept performance isn't so good, or bite the bullet and find the scratch to upgrade. YMMV. And complain about it on social media.
Many users will not want to spend 2% of their storage and allocate half their memory just to run a web browser.
Oh yes they will. For many/most users, a web browser is pretty much all they use outside of maybe games. And most users have exactly zero idea how much each app consumes...they just assume when they double click it's go-time.
Personally, I doubt anything more than "This app uses AI. You good? Y/N." will work.
> It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of
> You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era. And think of the Web - how many gigabytes of terrible adtech and tracking code does the average user download in a month of web browsing without an adblocker? Remember, each one probably packages in a couple hundred NPM dependencies into its bundle.
So what are you saying? Don't be mad over this becoming the norm, just shut up and sit down and accept it?
The story is only trending because it’s an AI model and the internet is anti-ai right now. It’s a double standard.
It’s like how people are outraged that electricity is being used in data centers to power AI models. When you do the math, the power consumption is far, far less than all the other things you do all day without thinking twice. But again, anti-AI double standard
>A product like Chrome probably has 10,000-ish features, maybe more.
It doesn't have 10,000-ish features that take 4GB of space.
Chrome doesn't take 40TB on my hard drive.
The machine I'm typing it on has 10GB free right now, and that was after I cleaned it up. I noticed the hard drive filling up when I was doing nothing, but I didn't suspect Chrome of all tihngs.
if someone doesn’t want ai on their devices, you think it’s a double standard that they’re annoyed when it’s installed anyway?
i’m not anti-ai by any stretch, but to pretend like their personal choices don’t matter is a bit too dismissive. it’s their choice, we probably shouldn’t imply other people having their own personal taste is hysterical or whatever it is you’re dancing around.
There are many technologies that begin in the corporate world on the enterprise level, and/or in research and education fields, and then trickle down to consumers. And basically anytime a tech reaches consumers, it's a fait accompli; it's ingrained in the business world 100%; scientists and defense contractors have blessed it.
The Avalanche Has Already Started. It is Too Late for the Pebbles to Vote. -- Ambassador Kosh Naranek
The funny thing about "AI Data Centers!!1!" is that they're unsurprising to anyone who knows the progression of this. First there were gigantic computers. Then telecom closets and machine rooms. Those machine rooms and closets got big and hungry! But they were hidden inside drab office space and far inside security perimeters and nobody really paid them mind, because it was part of doing business for the businesses.
Then came the cloud mania and corporations began gutting their machine rooms and migrating to the clouds. So if the consumption and demand for resources ramped up, who knows, but it was transferred from a very distributed, scattered model to centralized in a few big datacenters.
And now those datacenters are becoming an end unto themselves and everyone's gotta get one. Yeah, the scale and consumption of computing increases, but this has been evolutionary and it's only alarming because now, you can drive around a big city and pass several obvious data centers (and a few non-obvious ones) on your way. Did people freak out over AT&T constructing central offices? Dunno, those meant a lot of jobs. We all needed to reach out and touch someone.
The 'internet' is not an entity. Outrage and engagement drive ads. Beyond that 'AI' has very little benefit for most people and it's straight loss if you look at consumer electronics (getting price out of PCs) or energy prices.
I’m actually quite interested in this on device scam detection and might be installing chrome on my aunts computer. She’s an upper 70s millionaire widow who is constantly confused and attacked by a deluge of convincing scam emails.
Just fyi, this is not a temporary phenomenon, not a phase. People dont like spam, robocalls, persistent advertising, even as we use the tools that enable them. They definitely wont like massive job losses, if that actually comes to fruition. Constant surveillance, "slop" news and entertainment, significantly reduced human contact - not popular. Like most technologies, AI benefits a small group - those who control the means of production - but everyone else loses out.
Not just the Internet either. People are actively talking about data centres using available electricity, and the constant push from employers of using AI for things it clearly isn't suited for. Not to mention the constant "Let me talk to a real person" requests -- people see AI's everywhere and often have no desire to interact with them.
It certainly makes me uncomfortable given the current capabilities of AI and what the tech CEOs have said about what they see AI becoming. It's not just like any other feature. Am considering uninstalling and no longer using Chrome on principle now.
Those disks have been too small to be a reasonable default, and getting even more unreasonable by the day, for a decade, so while I agree that's a great reason to be quite peeved about this move, I'd be mad at Apple even more.
I'm surprised so many people still use Chrome. there are perfectly serviceable browsers which block ads. do normies not know you can block ads if you use a different browser?
They don't. A large number of them don't even care. Some even click on all of the "allow this site to send you notifications" and then proceed to get spammed by hundreds of notifications on their phone/PC. And don't mind it.
You are very right, though it's difficult for those of us here to imagine it. 20 years ago, people would browse the Web through a 11-inch by 4 inch slit because all the adware toolbars had nearly occluded the whole viewport. Today most of the webpages themselves look like that without an adblocker and most people just tolerate it. And even click the ads!
It clearly isn't the only other option - otherwise you wouldn't have people like you and others in this thread being outraged about people taking one of the other options.
That we as a society are beholden to corporations is a myth those corporations want you to believe but its not how things actually work. If we come together to say no then those corporations either comply or will cease to exist.
What did I say that made you think I’m outraged? If a product isn’t suiting you, just use a different product. Personally, I switched to Firefox years ago.
I’m a bit confused about the activist mindset being applied to a web browser, as if there’s some kind of human right that entitles you to dictate what will or won’t be bundled inside Chrome.
If the internet was like this in 2015, there would have been riots over Chrome implementing DRM for video. Widevine?! Not on our watch!
Is it? It's kind of the heart of the matter - just because something is common doesn't mean it's acceptable. The difference is that in our society we've all agreed the sacrificing is no longer acceptable.
I, personally, have found the adtech bloat (for both disk space and processor usage) to be a huge issue for quite some time. If this is the hill where the public decides to take a stand I'll happily stand beside them to try and reverse this gradual enshittification. I think several other hills were more worthy to defend but nobody noticed those ones so apparently this is the place to fight that fight.
I doubt anyone would appreciate software bloat purely because of how widespread it is[1] - it just hasn't risen to the level where it's so noticeable for such a contemporarily controversial topic yet.
1. As an aside - ubisoft game sizes are absolutely bonkers. I didn't realize that each Assassin's Creed had twelve different operating systems crammed into it but I can't see how else they're clocking in where they do.
Yeah, I was surprised to learn that Ticket to Ride (downloaded on Steam) uses like a half gigabyte, but the most data-intense thing it does is a few musical tracks and 2D images with scaling. They fit Final Fantasy 3 (SNES) with 3 CDs of music (albeit low quality) and Mode 7 graphics for the airship onto like 3 MB.
I would confidently state that in terms of hours of enjoyment per byte, nothing can come even close to the 16-bit era. I can't count how many hours of Super Mario World I played. 512 freakin KB. I don't think anything will ever come close to it - and even if you measured one full typical playthrough.
>They fit Final Fantasy 3 (SNES) with 3 CDs of music (albeit low quality) and Mode 7 graphics for the airship onto like 3 MB.
Sure, the good old days where _all of this didn't work without specialized hardware that you bought with every single cartridge_. Mode 7 didn't come for free, it was an entire additional, single purpose chip in the cart on a console that didn't have any concept of task management or even OS. But hey, if you want to have to plug in and swap PCIE cards for each piece of software that you want to run, feel free to reinstall DOS.
There's a name for when a virus scanner finds a program that may have a legitimate purpose, yet is typically bundled into other software in a malicious manner.
It's called a PUP, or Potentially Unwanted Program and most anti-viruses offer to remove them. They can be legitimately installed, but often aren't. (Usually they were shipped in the installers of legitimate software downloaded from sketchy distributors.)
Random AI models being shipped with Chrome is very much a PUP. The user wanted to browse the internet, not use a model. They'd install an extension if they wanted that.
The Ask toolbar was seen as a virus. Mozilla had massive user bleed in Firefox due to installing sponsored extensions in the browser. The only reason this shit isn't regarded the same way is because it's both done by Google and because it's labeled with AI, so all AI bros have to retroactively find an excuse to justify it.
Equating a 4GB file installed without explicit consent to the installation of a language dictionary is comical. That's like saying an unwanted political mailer left in your mailbox is the equivalent of a pallette of hammers left in your driveway.
It sounds like you have a specific number of GB in mind that an app can take up, below which it's totally their business, and above which they need to plead their case, disclose the purpose, and allow me to choose.
What's that number? How did you arrive at it and why?
My Chrome binaries are about 700MB on Mac and 500MB on Windows. Is this below or your line, or are they actually in trouble as soon as they're extracted?
My point is just that it seems there may be an arbitrary limit here that may not be the same for everyone (and 90% of users are nontechnical and thus couldn't give an answer whether 4GB is "worth it" for whatever the features are). Rather than add another whole ecosystem of "Cancel or Allow?" dialogs I'd rather operating systems did a better job of letting users put piggish applications on a strict space budget. Most of the apps on my phone are storing half a gig of "stuff" (called "Documents & Data" but not itemized, and even apps that have none of my 'data' such as browsers), which I can't force them to dump even in an extreme emergency. I can only delete the whole app.
I'm talking about Apple platforms as examples because I use those a lot and with their epic stinginess of SSD, anyone who doesn't pay $400 more than the base model will exhaust their storage within hours to months.
People don't typically have specific numbers already set aside whenever they discuss what is too much. The example given was people can handle a political flyer in the mailbox but not a pallet of hammers delivered in their driveway. Do you have specific amounts (probably will need to be a weight limit and a volume limit) already figured out when you think of how much junk someone can mail to you reasonably? Or how much HD space a browser is allowed to install before it gets to be not-their-buisness?
So as long as I'm allowed to bump into you I can also smash your face in, right? After all there isn't any clear point where I'm applying too much force.
agreed that not everyone has the same limit, but 4GB is big enough to be annoying to many. that still costs real money (in bandwidth) and storage (on low-end hardware) for a lot of folks.
> My Chrome binaries are about 700MB on Mac and 500MB on Windows
That's kind-of the point though right? An application that has been say <700 MB for decades, suddenly deciding it'll take a multiple of it's size without asking seems pretty unreasonable, I think it's pretty fair to say the expectations for Chrome were set already.
It'd be similarly unreasonable for a video game that once took 50 GB, to suddenly decide to take 400 GB.
Local storage and cache only have limits relative to available disk space in Chrome, IIRC, and can easily bloat to 100 GB without intervention. Personally I think that's a design flaw and they need customizable hard limits as well, but web browsers wasting space without asking is not a new or sudden development.
What a completely asinine post. I'm sick of seemingly smart people in the technical world think they are being so clever by trying to literally rehash the continuum fallacy. You hear this literally everytime anyone even so much as suggests a standard, norm or god forbid a regulation. It seems especially common among libertarian types who think governance of any kind of simply impossible because of it.
Just because there is a gradual spectrum between two states doesn't mean we can't draw distinctions. For example, just because we cannot define the exact, precise color when blue turns into green, it does not mean that blue and green are the same color for any normal person discussing an issue publicly in good faith.
When someone says "X and Y are on a spectrum, X is good and Y is bad", the point is to highlight the differences. Pointing out that the spectrum or continuum might not have a precise boundary has literally zero weight towards the validity of the ultimate conclusion a person is making here and really is just a complete derail done by people who have no substantive points to make.
The idea I was replying to suggests "consent" is needed, but apparently just for this one example of bloat.
And doesn't explain how normal non-hacker users (99% of the audience) are supposed to judge what "4GB" means to them.
I'm all for users getting to have more control over the usage of their finite resources, especially in this cursed age of soldered-down storage and RAM. But I disagree that some dialog that explains the feature and asks permission to use 4GB would improve anything. Honestly, it wouldn't even improve the PR with this crowd, it would just change the headline to "Chrome pushing users to download and install a 4GB model for so-called 'AI features'!"
Agreed. If anything your comment is too charitable. This is just one of the GP's highly sophistic comments here. Considering how he is exploiting the sorites paradox, I wouldn't be surprised if he bases his sophism on Zeno's paradox from time to time.
Excuse me while I go count the hairs on my chin to see if they are >= MIN_BEARD_THRESHOLD.
I'm sorry to have offended you. I had to go research all your interesting Greek philosophy terms.
I don't think it's too much to ask that someone at least define their line if they are saying apps must ask permission to use disk space. I didn't say consent is irrelevant. And I think when you're asking to burden the user with a technical question such as "Can I use 4GB" I struggle to see how most people can make a good informed choice. You can argue in this one case that the AI model is not useful and therefore it's "good actually" if users, not being able to judge what 4GB is, reject it even when they actually had plenty of space. But it seems like those who disagree with me here aren't really speaking to whether the model is useful (or if it has future potential), they're mad specifically about an app downloading a thing that's 'too big.'
Also, just pointing out - Apple also uses ODMs, which it installs on its customers' hardware via its normal default-on software update procedure, to power its (imho mostly useless) AI - to great praise for the positive privacy ramifications of on-device. So it's interesting to me that this one model's presence is being cited as a betrayal of user trust. I admit though that it's whataboutism to imply that excuses the behavior of anyone else - if we are saying that any software downloading anything over 1GB (or whatever) is bad.
Personally I'm pissed at both. A large jump in requirements without warning is bad, if I want to avoid it I now need to take immediate less considered actions or get stuck with the consequences. Plenty of decent software actually lets you decide what plugins to install for added functionality, chrome actually has a extensions store that they could have put this crap in.
Yes it's also that it's AI and mostly that chrome is foisting off all the cost of that AI model to me and other users. Without warning and explaining what this model is, is my workplaces power cost going to be up 10% because of whatever they want to run it for? Who knows.
There'd be a lot less complaining if they'd actually warned and less still if they asked.
Honestly this is 2026. Chrome on my phone is nearly 2gb. Google on my phone is 1gb. 4gb storage isn't outrageous, Windows barely runs on anything below 128gb storage. Right now my phone has 445gb unused memory and usage isn't likely to go up much. My PlayStation eats 500gb for breakfast. Heck I use a 2011 Thinkpad for casual use and it should still be fine with it.
This is also GOOGLE chrome, it serves their ends, in the past that was to render internet unimpeded (they saw a need then), needs change.
I'd rather models serve most requests locally anyway, so long as it's not destroying my battery life.
Remember the whole chrome-RAM-gate saga? This shouldn't be shocking to anyone.
PC's shipping 8gb ram, Google removing ad blocker extensions, these should be the real rally points.
To get so upset over this is crazy, no need to be so pedantic. Needs change.
Your 2015 MacBook pro had 8gb ram and 128gb storage, the current equivalent has minimum 24gb ram and 1tb or 2tb. Please explain what you're using all this storage for??
Raw footage or something, well there's some double standards it's just a photo too if this is just a browser. 4gb is immaterial.
The issue is the size of the 'update' and the impact it'z going to have on your computer performance.
If tomorrow Google was to include a Blockchain miner in Google chrome, you'd still say you consented to it by using their software ?
Because I'm pretty sure that this LLM is also going to be used by Google to gather data on the user and feeding it to Google, hence just like the Blockchain miner using our computer ressources (space & performance) to feed Google yearly benefits.
> Reminds me a bit of back when installing software was a minefield due to all of the integrated "promotions" for things like toolbars, only now they've vertically integrated the unwanted software, cutting out the middleman.
You know, I never thought about it like that, but it is true. The bloat and spyware is a core part of the OS now.
Chrome installs additional software that 99% of users don't use. It can intercept and modify code running on your computer, and spies on all network requests. Hackers use it to analyze potential vulnerabilities. 90% of users aren't even aware that it exists!
> It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of.
You just described at least 90% of the software packages on your machine, if not 100%. Almost all software contains modules that go unused by certain users.
You could say the same thing about shipping V8 with Chrome. Some users disable JS so shipping V8 with Chrome is additional software they didn't ask for.
The old unix administrator would expect a platform to ship choice of JS that would be in /usr/bin/JS. The local administrator would add their local choice of JS /usr/local/bin/V8.
The browser would then have a configuration option of which JS interpreter to use.
Bad analogy. "Some users disable it" is very different from "it was introduced without any notification or information about what it does and the vast majority of laypeople have negative sentiment toward it".
Local subreddits are filled with posts "calling out" usage of AI by local businesses or governments. Consensus is that persons who are found out to be be AI users should be fired or resign, businesses that use it should be boycotted / shamed, etc.
ChatGPT (a 3 year old product) has nearly one billion WAU.
Some people detest businesses slopping AI at them, but the evidence suggests consumers love using AI, which is presumably one of the primary uses of a micro LLM model that runs locally on your computer and is embedded in your browser.
People that post on "local subreddits" and the randos that protest datacenters are once again a vocal minority. Reddit in particular is probably the most echo-chambery destination on the web.
There's an important distinction between chatbots people go to on websites or download from the app store versus a product downloading without their consent. There's also a massive difference from large power and water hungry data centers being built near people. I don't think those are particularly popular across party lines regardless of ChatGPT usage.
So yeah in general AI as a helpful tool people use online is popular. AI to replace jobs, build data centers and do unknown things on your device without consent, not so much. AI to potentially replace workers, not popular at all.
I'm not sure you understand the distinction you are making.
The model Google is shipping with Chrome runs on device. ChatGPT does not. The people that dont like data centers should love this feature. Same with people who are concerned about privacy.
> I mean honestly, how large is an English dictionary? 100 KiB?
If it contains less than 50,000 words, perhaps, but most standard print dictionaries contain ~500,000 entries. The size of /usr/share/dict/words on my system is 954 KiB and the small version of the cracklib dictionary is 481 KiB.
It's not processor op-codes, but sure it's part of the software. You wouldn't say that a set of precomputed weights in a numerical integrator aren't part of the software, would you? Or say that the graphics in a game aren't part of the software?
How does that change anything? It doesn't matter if you categorize it as software or not, unwanted is unwanted. And frankly I just flatly disagree, you could certainly make the case that model weights are a form of software.
If they downloaded a 4GiB media file of some Irish band that nobody asked for, people would be upset as well. It doesn't matter what the 4GiB contains. If it is not going to be used by the user and the user didn't ask for it, that's just idiotic to think people would not be upset about it.
Honestly, for most features you could justifiably say its fine. I mean honestly, how large is an English dictionary? 100 KiB? That is a far cry from 4 GiB. Just taking up 4 GiB of disk space without even asking is indeed a shit move no matter how you shake it. If Microsoft Word updated and suddenly took up 4 GiB more for something like a dictionary, it might not cause as much uproar as if it were something that many people are tired of hearing about and not interested in, but I'm not sure you would find a single soul who would find that acceptable, more just tolerated, probably partly because a lot of people simply wouldn't know better.