161–170 of 1001 posts
I thought using local rather than cloud AI was pretty universally agreed to be good?
Except these weights are barely used. Read the article.
> the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in , tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus
Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?
What are the alternatives? Only a massively moneyed corp has the resources to fight vulns at acceptable rates. Firefox doesn’t count because they’re being funded by Google.
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.
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Please feel free to suggest a better alternative.
FWIW I've recently moved from Firefox to Helium after 10+ years. Yes, I hate that it's also Chromium, but no, there aren't real alternatives.
There's also WebKit-based FOSS browsers not based on Chromium nor Gecko. Upstream it's maintained by Apple but the open source webkit browsers should not have any questionable features by default.
If Chrome has the #optimization-guide-on-device-model and #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano flags enabled, either because it's part of some Origin Trial / Early Stable Release or something, then web pages will have access to the new Prompt API which allows any webpage to initiate the (one-time) download of the ~2.7 GiB CPU or ~4.0 GiB GPU model using LanguageModel.create() https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api Wh…
It is a small model, so what utility can I / Google expect from it? What is the on-board model used for?
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.
Sorry but the whole climate angle on this is extremely stupid and needs to be challenged. I have noticed this new phenomenon of people using climate as a trump card to oppose any thing they don’t like. The thing about these kind of arguments is that any economic activity or any sort of action involves some load on climate. The magnitudes are important. In this case: a single hamburger does the same amount of emission…
There is consumer demand for hamburgers. There is no consumer demand for AI, hence how egregious that it also comes with negative externalities.
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What is a lot of traffic to you? 2.5 million downloads of 4 GB are 10 PB of traffic. I think there are be a lot more than 2.5 million Chrome users in the world.
You only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.
Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.
is about 60 gramms of co2 per user?