Hacker News

> 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.'"

> That is a far cry from 4 GiB

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.

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.

It's just more efficient that way!

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!

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.

An AI is not additional software. Infact, a model is not software.

Shipping the model with the browser is exactly the opposite of what you are claiming.

The alternative is sending the data to Google.

I don't think this is a question of framing or ignoring problematic behavior at all. I'm quite certain that you wouldn't find it anywhere near comparably egregious if Google added a new developer option without your consent- the most significant problem is the 4GB and the LLM. And, of course, you did consent to their software terms. You are free to switch browsers. What does consent have to do with this?

Exactly this. My issue with Microslop isn't that they're using AI, that is its own can of worms.

It's the fact that they were forcing it into MY computer, using MY bandwidth for THEIR profit goals. The lack of consent was the final nail in the coffin for me, no computer in my house uses Windows now, and it will at best be a long time before that changes.

I got rid of Chrome ages ago as well. Chrome's only redeeming feature is its user base. It's slower, uses more system resources, ugly as a browser, and now its an AI rapist too.

> The only difference is one can choose to use a different browser easier than they can choose a different OS.

I'm not even sure that is actually true for most people. If you mainly work in the browser, which many do, then you can change the OS under it without impacting the user too much but change the browser and there will need to be much more to adapt/relearn.

>Chrome is not entitled to my disk space just because I installed it

When you install any program it becomes entitled to your disk space, by the definition of installation. If you don’t like the program, you can just uninstall it and it’ll no longer take up your disk space.

The difference would be intent. A nearby comment worries that the endgame is the ODM being used to monitor you and report back. Certainly wouldn't put it past the world's biggest ad company to think of that! And if that is what purpose it's put to, I think I'll be mad too.

If Chrome shipped a crypto miner and used the resulting coins generated on my device to let me automatically bypass paywalls with micropayments that would be way better than if they shipped the same and just took the coins.

It ends at the usual place, the shrink-wrap agreement. What did the license agreement say?

What is the line is a good question. I'm strongly pro-user agency, but I still think consent is more around what actually impacts the user. If there's some safeguards, for exceptional cirumstances that users can get into if they need it, I feel like the software has to be doing more, having more of an impact on you for there to be an offense or problem here.

That said, I do want to amplify agency. I don't immediately know what to expect for disarming this. If a website starts hitting the API heavily and my machine's fans are spinning up, where am I at, and what do I expect? It feels like the web is close already, with a pretty sophisticated permissions model, where we go to look for things. I'm interested in an evolved permissions model for the web, where even when permissions are on by default, it's the same flow to turn them off. I think that would remove a lot of the grounds for "I don't want this" that seems so persistently abundant these days.

Even it feels like the risk is so low/non-existent, if the user's demanding less agency from the their user agent, in principle I guess we ought give them the less that they asked for. Usually. But that always has some kind of practical limit too. CSS made some people mad! It's ok for this not to be the software for you, for you to go need to go somewhere else.

I believe that relatively inert capabilities like this, where mostly it's taking up some storage space and joules, is generally not really altering the contract, and is fine.

Auto-updating browsers is one of the best advances in the web dev space in the past decade. I find it hard to believe that anyone who did web development before evergreen browsers became a thing would ever disagree.

Welcome to 2026, in which a browser is an operating system!

> nothing new with the browser vendor pushing plugins down our throat which are not browser core features

You need to find another browser, if your desire is only browser core features. You have that freedom!! You can do it!

On the other hand: I don't think anyone caters to that position, because it's a bad/nonsense position, that users don't want. There are some browsers that come closer to this, but this idea of "browser core features" is, on the face of it, to me, reduction deeply into the absurd.

> I wanted/consented to a browser. Nothing more.

I agree. I want just a browser. No non-browser-related features, such as JavaScript, CSS, WebRTC, WebGPU, Wasm, etc. Nope, just browsing.

Edit: /s, obviously

It’s actually really useful for web devs to have access to a local model. Whether or not browsers should bundle their own rather than using the system-provided model(s) is up for debate, however. For the time being, though, Google does have some of the better small ones.

Furthermore, users aren’t going to want to have to wait for an extra thing to download before their web apps can use AI.

That’s the thing… Without context of why, users probably wouldn’t want a 4 GB download. But they do want their web apps to work properly. When there’s a specific use case they’re interested in, they will want to have it, and they won’t want to wait.

A crypto miner needs consent because it burns your battery and CPU power with no benefit to you. This AI model would only be used when you invoke it so the only problem is disk space, which the comment you're replying to acknowledges as a point of issue.

wellackshually the bloatware explicitly asked for consent. There was a checkbox at the end of the EULA asking you "I also don't agree to not install the ask.com toolbar. You wouldn't do that, would you?". There is a state of that checkbox which would not install the toolbar, because, as you know, it's not part of the software I'm trying to install. That state, however, is left as an exercise for the decompiler. :)

Though I kinda agree that framing it as "consent" feels a bit off even if I myself would say no if only Chrome had the courtesy to ask. What icks me more is a 4GB[1] blob that has no relevance to the primary business of being a web browser; this is basically the IE anti-trust issue all over again. And it's an experimental feature! Under saner policies this thing would be a plugin from "Google Chrome Labs".

[1] I found weights.bin in Ubuntu 22.04 Chrome v147.0.7727.137 but it's "only" 2.7GB. Still, my ick stands.

Invoking a different case with bad logic doesn't make this one any stronger. I never understand this impulse, is it just "nuh uh!"?

That was also stupid

TIL, what a nutty situation.

Incorrect. Adding LLMs in the browser IS the backdoor into your computer.

What % of Chrome users (this is the default browser that nearly every 'normal person' uses) do you think is confident (and knowledgeable) enough to answer this quiz:

  For each, indicate whether it's closest to: 4MB, 4GB, or 400GB:

  1. One MP3 song.

  2. A 2-hour movie streamed from Netflix at 4K

  3. The capacity of this computer's SSD.

  4. The free space on the SSD.

  5. The whole of English Wikipedia not including images

  6. a AAA game from 2010 with all its supporting files and DLC

  7. a AAA game from 2026 with all its supporting files and DLC

  8. The total of all software updates you installed last month

not just that, unfortunately

This is just today

"Tech giants Microsoft, Google and xAI say they will allow the United States federal government access to their new artificial intelligence models for national security testing." https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/5/5/microsoft-google-...

Local models exist as part of the solution to privacy invasion. Not saying google has never been nefarious, but the whole point of local models is that your data doesn't leave your device.

You're arguing in bad faith.

By that reasoning, any novel/cutting-edge addition to a browser or other software is wrong? Every standard was new at some point.

At least Word lets me choose which dictionaries I want to install during its installation. With an estimate on how much disk space it will take.

There was a point in time when a spellchecker was not a standard function of a text program, and a spellcheck dictionary would have been considered a large file to include with that kind of software.

I'm not a fan of Google's actions here, but I do think it's possible that at some future time we'll say, "but a local AI model is a standard function of a web browser."

That was an even more ridiculous post. It wasn't spyware, it was a messaging bridge being installed for exactly the purpose it was intended. It was Claude Desktop installing a bridge that would allow Claude browser plugins to communicate with it. It was only used if the user had installed the browser plugin, and all it did was grant that plugin access to the app that had installed it!

We should be actively anti-AI being part of a web browser just like that though.

It's not about AI. I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't be ok with eg a calculator app shipping a 4GB word processor.

Maybe it’s pro-browser activism.

A browser should render web pages not bring its own AI

It is? Or is it just a pragmatic dislike?

We don't have AI. We have language models trained by rapacious companies on copyrighted material with no concern for copyright violations and with a penchant for intentionally anthropomorhizing their models.

I'm an anti corporate malfeasance activist.

Hacker News and it's underemployed and underpaid user base gets these two confused all the time. I assure you, your tolerance for language models, or your willingness to use them, will have _zero_ impacts on your pay scale in the coming decade.

Finally you should be aware that Google markets this addition as an "anti fraud" and "anti spam" feature. They should have to justify that, I shouldn't have to justify my expectations as a consumer.

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

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

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

Told ya.

The company I work at has several environments and hundreds of VDI users in each environment. Chrome is the default browser in all of them. By my rough napkin math, this one small change by Google will eat up at least 15 terabytes of new disk space in total. (I sure hope we are using deduplication at the physical storage layer...)

Does each playwright (or similar automation system) count as a different user, and does it keep the model around ?

If yes, it's an interesting API to call when a AI crawler hit your website.

4GB, $0.10 (whatever the HD price) that is the equivalent of a High School level intelligent brain that can perform many cognitive tasks (and in the future even PhD level intelligence) for free?

Oh, the horror!!!

Wait, let me pay my HVAC guy $500 he deserved because he came all the way from his home to replace a fuse

Both of them say they use Gemini Nano.

So now we're up to 6 GB

I was thinking a similar thing. Many of our customers have purpose use computers that rarely see physical infrastructure internet, but need a modern browser (many chose Chrome on their own, we never recommended it).

They're going to get blasted with cellular data charges when they fire up their computer in the field.

Google's updater service also currently ignores the windows 11 metered connection hint. It will gladly download that model over your cell connection even if you have a data cap.

This is infuriating behavior.

Silicon Valley must wake up and understand the entire world does not live like them.

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.

I find models of this size (not tested this one specifically) at being very good at simple data extraction from user input. Think about things like parsing date and time of an event from a description or parsing a human-typed description of a repeating event rule.

this is considered a large model. i think you might be surprised how many "small" models chrome has already pulled down on your disk.

but to answer your question: one of the services that uses a small model: PermissionsAIv4

""" Use the Permission Predictions Service and the AIv4 model to surface permission notification requests using a quieter UI when the likelihood of the user granting the permission is predicted to be low. Requires `Make Searches and Browsing Better` to be enabled. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android """

I ran a fairly large production test of this and on _every_ measure except for privacy it was worse than a free tier server hosted LLM.

Not happy about that as I would like to see more local models but that's the current state of things.

https://sendcheckit.com/blog/ai-powered-subject-line-alterna...

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

> It is a small model, so what utility can I / Google expect from it?

Precedence for shipping models alongside consumer software.

Potentially without consent if it truly is a silent install.

I'm on Chrome 147 too and disabled:

"optimization-guide-on-device-model"

- Enables optimization guide on device

"prompt-api-for-gemini-nano"

- Prompt API for Gemini Nano

- Prompt API for Gemini Nano with Multimodal Input

and deleted weights.bin and the 2025.x folder in "OptGuideOnDeviceModel"

Will report if Chrome 148 downloads the model again.

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.

[dead]

Depends on where you get it. By default the flags will be enabled, but some packagers may choose to disable them. I haven't seen a major distro release chromium 148 yet.

Weirdly though, chromium won't be able to actually use the model even though it can download it, because the inference engine is a closed-source blob.

https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-th...

In my understanding, yes. I wrote a blog post about some of the internals here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028662

It can only be called after the user has interacted with the page, but there's no dialogue from the browser

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started#user-activa...

Google has not ever cared about the real world implications of their browser decisions in the past. I can't say I'm surprised that they didn't start caring for this occasion.

That would create vastly more support issues. You don't get to choose the software your users need.

Because due to Google having a near-monopoly on the entire goddamn Internet, a shocking number of websites and services will refuse to work with non-chrome browsers.

Kagi Maps isn't bad, it's slow but POIs are there with enough data.

Oh, one of those people. Gotcha. Back in the early days of my career (can't remember exactly, possibly 2010?) I tried making screensavers and gave them away on my website, someone followed me directly on twitter then tweeted to everyone that my screensavers were some kind of malware because… I'd named the main class as per the tutorial and somehow this looked scary.

It would also imply that it costs Google ~7¢ in only energy cost to deliver that file to you (using average EU energy costs), which is clearly non-sensical given the rates hyperscalers charge for network egress.

Additionally, the cited number also conflates wired internet (low power consumption) with mobile internet (higher), even though this model is only being downloaded to Chrome Desktop AFAICT.

I'd guess there is some offset power needed for keeping a "line" open. Like, 200 kB/s is not twice the power of 100?

Clearly you're charging an EV to drive a jar of microsd cards with your data back and forth

1.8 to 4.5 kW.

Long term historical trend, lots of small tech improvements that add up, like all other tech. Some of it's how antennas are higher gain, which puts more of the energy in the path from one end of a line to the other and wasting less (affecting both cellular and WiFi standards over this period), some is improved compute reducing the cost of routing, but as with the improvements to chips and batteries and PV, the list of things is long and each one only contributes part of it.

EDIT: got the maths very wrong with some other estimates, deleted them.

Seems reasonable to believe to me. The cost of a transfer is presumably calculated based on the base power cost of the transfer machinery, since I really doubt that a router or switch's power usage is linear with the amount of data it's transferring. The amount that an industrial router or switch (which is what 80-90% of the hops between you and Google are) has to have increased its bandwidth by around 10x over that time, and I doubt they have 10x'd their energy usage.

Eight years ago my internet was using a current over a copper wire. Now it's light through glass. The latter is much more efficient especially over longer distances.

That's a good point. "Downloads a 4GB LLM model without notice" would get a good amount of attention and be an accurate representation of the situation. The article undermines itself by misrepresenting the problem.

[flagged]

> it's happening silently as part of a normal upgrade.

No, this is not true. The large requirement comes after a user wants to use the feature, not as a part of the normal upgrade. If the user never engages with the feature, it's not downloaded.

Yes because in their mind corporate power is the only thing that matters in our lives. Not what people want, but what Google wants is clearly the only thing that matters for them.

It's a bizarre way of living your life.

Isn't that what it always has done after caching a few weeks of websites?

What part of rendering a web page needs Gemini?

We live in a tech world where it has become normalized that perfectly functioning software that you used to buy once and then got to use indefinitely suddenly receives an "update" to put previously existing functionality behind a pain subscription. The reasonable expectation people have is that an update fixes security bugs and maybe includes a few optimizations.

So no, I don't think it's a weird trend at all that people start describing software as "silently" doing things when trust in automatic updates of software (a thing that software silently does) has deservedly gone down the drain in the last few years.

No weird: accurate. It IS a silent install.

I wanted a browser, not an LLM.

If it gets the clicks it sticks.

Install does convey something more involved than including a file, that's not splitting hairs. It is not uncommon for software to include malware that runs independently of the software you expected, and the headline is clickbait that taps into those concerns. I'm here for the concerns about bloat. "Downloads" would have been the right term to use but it doesn't sound as scary.

> A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a web browser.

Problem is, nor do half its T&Cs. What we thought was a web browser turns out to be a Google content delivery vehicle - and controlled by Google, not the target users.

> A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a web browser. It is something forced on users without their consent.

This does not happen. The model is not downloaded unless the user intentionally uses the feature that requires it. Then it's downloaded at that point.

"functionality of the software" has already been mentioned haha

> I suppose this means that ALL the browser vendors are likely to implement something

Mozilla has taken a strong stand against the prompt api.

Or accidentally trigger it because you're using a key binding you've used for 15 years that, upon hitting an unexpected consent screen, triggers the consent button.

Don't forget the metric saying "99.97% of user have installed this" even though less than 1% of users know it exists, much less use it

at this point you're barely the product either. You're more a passive platform for them to execute their strategy on.

> Then they can't brag to the shareholders about Chrome being "AI Powered"

Or at least justify the hundreds of billions they are burning

I was not happy when they added Gemini to the top bar, in its own place that nothing else gets to use.

Doesn't google already extract every single letter you put into the address bar as you type?

The idea that the model is local is just Privacy Washing. What's the chance they aren't capturing your prompts somehow? For "Telemetry" so they can triage bugs of course!

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

Yeah I have to run ski race software with slow and intermittent internet. It is things like this that can wreck the race and bankrupt the small club if we have to refund entry fees to an entire field. It really is brutal and real. Looking at you windows update and now Google and Chrome.

yeah 3 bucks a gig here for quite a while, finally got a kinda sorta unlimited connection recently. I scripted up a meter of sorts to watch my traffic and its amazing how much is just trash. video advertising of any sort is awful. there were many sites that if I just forgot about them in the browser window they would happily reload periodically and trash my days budget lol, then using "links" for just reading really shows off how many websites just reject you for not having javascript.

now I'm working on upgrading my computer lol

It's somewhat known that Chrome isn't catering to those users. They aim to deliver feature-rich experiences rather than be the de-facto browser for resource-constrained devices.

Okay, but that's still not an environmental disaster.

I 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.

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

> but lets assume 29 grams of CO2e per GB

29 grams for something that takes most folks less than 20 seconds to download? How many watts (neglecting the machinery was going to be running regardless of whether you are transferring something!) do you think it takes to transfer data?

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11

Coal, the absolute worst of all, represents 18 grams over 60 full seconds to produce 1000 watts of power.

Traffic is not homogeneous in total transfer cost. CDN-hosted data at the edge, close to the user is much cheaper than data that has to transit many hops. At the asymptote, transferring data between machines on the LAN is essentially free.

Yes and this is just the first version of this model. As if there won't be an update (complete replacement) of the model every few months.

Other comparisons:

About equal to a major iOS update at 8 GB x 1.5B.

Netflix and YouTube together are perhaps around 200EB/month.

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

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

Wikipedia say 3.6 billion Chrome users.

And adding climate hysteria here diminishes the climate change argument generally. It's like "the boy who cried wolf".

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

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.

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

not just fiber, e.g. Netflix requires "only" (reliable) ~15Mb/s for a 4k stream, that means most people in most countries feel little difference between ~25 Mb/s and 1Gb/s in their "every day" usage. Sure it's a huge difference if you download a 80GiB AAA game, or preload a 4k movie. But in my experience (which definitely doesn't apply to all countries) a lot of non tech affine people don't do that that often an if they do it (e.g. movies before travel) they tend to do it over the night so it still works out just fine with not so fast internet.

So for a lot of people paying for more then 25-50Mb/s (pro person) makes only sense if it isn't too costly. Hence I rarely see people going for more then 250-500 Mb/s even iff 1Gb/s is available and they have money. And for non-gamers with little money, I mostly see them with ~50Mb/s (or paying for 50Mb/s but getting much less due to old wires :( ).

(Also IMHO The more important things compared to 1Gb/s is how much of the bought bandwidth is reliably available at all times _with good latency_...)

Yes, which is why I use paid-for OSes and browsers, instead of free ones like Linux or Firefox. I don't want to be the product.

Guess what runs my PC. Tech companies just don't understand consent.

There is a difference between

- software company decides to release a new version and auto installs it for everyone who has the old version (like Google Chrome)

- software company decides to release a new version. The Debian packaage maintainer checks if the update is fine, is compatible with Debian policies, then includes it in the packages repositories.

In the first, there are no checks. In the second, there are.

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".

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.

Is Vivaldi any good?

Brave origin on linux looks pretty solid now. Now I'm using that and Librewolf.

Firefox.

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.

Arc is still great on macOS (not so much the Windows build, essentially an abandoned beta) even if it's not getting active development anymore.

I'm defaulting to Firefox ever since I moved my desktop to CachyOS, but I need to either reacquaint myself with its add-on situation after a long arc of using "chrome alternatives", or migrate to something else niche. Vivaldi was what I was sold on before Arc caught my attention through its wonderful UX/UI.

Konform Browser

Mullvad Browser

Tor Browser for those occasions

I still use Firefox. It does all I need with no ads. That's nice.

Currently using Helium.

Safari

> Blink is the most featureful

It’s not a waste of bandwidth and disk space, it’s a feature!

Google's "don't be evil" motto already felt ironic over a decade ago, long before they even replaced it with "do the right thing [for shareholder value?]".

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

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 mess? I only ever used Chrome as my main browser for a short while when Firefox had become rather bloaty and had slow JS, and Chrome was small and nimble. But that was something like fifteen years ago. Firefox works, is plenty fast these days, and only eats most of my RAM compared to Chrome which takes all of it, and serves me a web devoid of almost all ads and most trackers.

Firefox has a complete UBo unlike the Chrom* corporateware turd which is just Microsoft 2.0 from Google. Chrome instead of IE, and propietary JS code for Google services such as Youtube -deliberately made slower in Firefox- as the new Active X shoved down your throat in order to keep a monopoly.

With Librewolf I can get proper WebGL, full UBo -with the AI blocklist too to avoid all the slop- and Bypass Paywall Clean from Giflic or whatever was called. Yeah, eh, y local newspaper won'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.

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

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.

> Firefox doesn’t count because they’re being funded by Google.

Even if that were true, it's still a better option _today_.

In the short term, Helium (if, like me, you can’t live without Chrome’s bookmarks). In the medium term, perhaps Ladybird. In the long term, we’re all dead.

Anything webkit-based and open source like Epiphany or Konqueror/Rekonq, it matches your "moneyed corp" requirement (Apple).

There's a setting in `chrome://flags` mentioned in the post that allows users to turn this off. I guess people want opt-in consent rather opt-out consent which there's always debate about. Some people say it degrades the experience for the majority of users who would opt-in for the happiness of the few possibly already detracting users.

Isn't that asking for consent?

the subject has been faced many years ago an super well applied in EU privacy regulations: Google knows it very well, and in super details and I have no doubt they will be fined for this despite all reduction of it thanks to their lobbying (and corruptions, too, in my super personal opinion): this fact well explain EU fines based on company's income.

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).

Read the article, it's not about that, but a mere 4GB of storage.

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

Hello iOS upgrade.

Don't install chrome in the first place then

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

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

If it's emissions they worry about, then it's anything emitting.

Are they against washing machines too? Or are they just grandfathered in?

Our planet is literally dying.

The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]

Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here'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...?