> 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://hackertimes.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.
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.'"