Does this only occur on Macs?
I think so.
Never faced this issue in Windows and Linux
How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
11–20 of 81 posts
Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
#12I'm going to post a theory that with 500Gb drives pretty much the normal size that most people won't notice 2.5% tied up in Chrome installs.
128/256 GB SSDs are pretty common on Macs. For instance, the base models of the air still have 128 GB.
Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
#13I'm going to post a theory that with 500Gb drives pretty much the normal size that most people won't notice 2.5% tied up in Chrome installs.
Except if you've bought a Lenovo 100s or similar, with 32GB of eMMC Flash storage. Then you'll cry.
My girlfriend was given a macbook air by her parents, and after OS and her normal programs were installed (office, chrome and not much else) she was left with 5G. 64G SSDs were common not very long ago, disk space for operational components is increasing.
Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
#14Both Chrome and Opera pull this shit. It's unbelievable they aren't fixing this.
Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
#15I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself. (Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Chrome.)
> I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself.
What do you mean ? if I download Chrome from the official website I get a third party installer ? because I have the exact same problem with that very official installer.
Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
#16This is embarrassingly bad. I know memory is cheap and mostly plentiful, but to have this as a bug for 5+ years is horrible. It's as though Chrome is going the route of web pages and not paying to the size of itself.
This is prior versions of Chrome taking up disk space, not memory. That's a completely separate issue.
Fortunately disk space, unlike memory, is infinite.
Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
#17I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself. (Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Chrome.)
It's true that based on the bug report linked in the post, the application bundle is modified by a 3rd party installer running as root. I still think Chrome should correctly handle the permissions problem with a warning or asking for root privileges to fix it, but I've updated the post to point out Chrome itself is not the origin of the problem.
Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
#18This is embarrassingly bad. I know memory is cheap and mostly plentiful, but to have this as a bug for 5+ years is horrible. It's as though Chrome is going the route of web pages and not paying to the size of itself.
Chrome has gone the way of IE. Chrome is memory and energy hungry (and now storage hungry if you believe this article), and Google doesn't care.
If you run Chrome on a laptop, you better plug it in.
Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
#19Does this only occur on Macs?
I had this same issue on XP running in a VM that wasn't set to grow on a Mac.
Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
#20This just seems like something that should've been fixed years ago
It was (in fact, it's not clear it was ever broken)
That's why if you look at the linked bug report, the only reports are of people who have used third party installers as root that screw up the permissions.
The bug report is basically "when i screw this up, chrome doesn't notice and fix it for me".