Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?
Easy. You work for a company that has only whitelisted chrome or edge.
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
321–330 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#322If 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 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...
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#323On one level, I can't figure out how bent out of shape to get over this (but read on). Software I use downloads updates all the time, adds new features all the time, and I mostly don't ask for any of it. So if you see this as just a new feature that provides some on-device AI, it's a bit, so what? A new feature? The last GT7 or Flight Sim patch was bigger than this, what's the big deal, etc. However, that's not reall…
Weird, I access PayPal through FF all the time. It's probably one of those weird geographical differences or something. One thing I did see is that at least one site (AliExpress) doesn't initiate the redirect after the payment, but still accepted the payment.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not agree: I live by the sea and this is exactly the answer I get when I talk about trash in the sea. I personally appreciate even more that kind of "stretch" then the privacy one (which could be another "stretch" on getting closer to 1984 scenario)
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 disagre…
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.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#325How hard would have been to add a simple message, warning people about it and offering to opt out? Most would have clicked OK without reading anyway, and Google could pretend they give a shit about users. Unless they expected blowback, and that kind of message is the "compromise" they want to eventually land on.
They don't want you to opt out. Then they can't brag to the shareholders about Chrome being "AI Powered" You're not even the customer when it comes to Google.
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
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you touch those files into existence and chown to root and chmod to 0, it shouldn’t be able to ever overwrite them right?
I'm on my phone now so I can't check if something has changed, but what you want to protect from change is the directory, not the files. A file can be deleted and created again if the process can write the directory.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#327Anyone, voluntarily installing a spy browser like Google Chrome on their devices, deserves this and much more.
Sometimes I marvel at how nice it would be to have such a narrow view of the world and other's perspectives and contexts. Life would be so much easier!
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#328And that will be 4GB per chrome instance I assume? (not profiles, instances ) And what happens with each electron app if it uses chrome? languagemodel should be an OS service..
Electron uses Chromium and nothing prevents them from disabling it, if it ever ends up there.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#329How hard would have been to add a simple message, warning people about it and offering to opt out? Most would have clicked OK without reading anyway, and Google could pretend they give a shit about users. Unless they expected blowback, and that kind of message is the "compromise" they want to eventually land on.
I think a local AI model is appreciated, but it being bundled and executed through Chrome, I expect that more or less all data get exfiltrated by Google.
They simply read your mails, how would you expect there to be anything resembling decency in a company like that? It is the ad business.
Bad thing is that people still use gmail.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#330"Silently installs" is misleading. They are including a file in the package which is presumably related to the functionality of the software. I don't use chrome for a long list of reasons but it is not standard or expected to get consent for that.
Look at how many headlines indicated that something is silently happening. It's a weird trend at the moment.
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.