871–880 of 1001 posts
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Why not force a light-weight browser and prohibit Chrome?
That would create vastly more support issues. You don't get to choose the software your users need.
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I agree to install it, but I don’t agree to automatic updates. The bigger problem is, I can hardly find where to disable Google’s automatic updates. In the end, I just locked the file permissions to stop that virus-like auto-update program from running.
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.
Can you imagine going to see a doctor, and in the middle of your appointment, the doctor drags you into the operating room to automatically update your body?
That's roughly how I feel about automatic updates. If you apply the concept of automatic updates to any industry outside of software, it would very easily be illegal. But strangely, this concept is considered legal when it comes to software.
This is what I've done after spending some time to look into it, this is for Linux Desktop: Delete Chrome's silent 4 GB AI model file and AI In Chrome, go to: chrome://flags Search for and Disable these: Enables optimization guide on device Prompt API for Gemini Nano AI Mode Open DevTools (F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I). Click the Settings (gear icon). Go to AI Innovations and uncheck Enable AI assistance. For Linux, in a bash…
An extra 4GB per user on our NFS home file server is going to be a huge pain (several thousand students). And for our Windows lab machines, they end up in AppData\Local (which isn’t redirected for operational reasons) so we either leave the profiles in place and let them accumulate (suboptimal) or clear out the profiles as we normally do and let it redownload, over and over again. As much as I’m against unexpected 4G…
The tactic used to work even as prevention to common RPC exploits (viruses/worms) on windows as well (in the early 2000s).
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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. :) Th…
I thought the issue with Java was that checkmark would check itself on update? I was trying to draw that parallel but maybe I'm misremembering
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Or just tethering abroad with an esim data plan... Just opening chrome would deplete your quota and leave you stranded. Google you are sick!
Surely it will wait when the connection is marked as metered.
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I have no idea but when I mention Firefox my colleagues under 35 or so literally think I'm joking.
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 litt…
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I have no idea but when I mention Firefox my colleagues under 35 or so literally think I'm joking.
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.
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Back to the assumptions. If the onboard LLM means no data sending and you get your own little service wholly subservient to you like a good little program. That's nice! If the onboard LLM means better data filtering, possibly even exploration of the local system, to send information to Google while lessening their datacentre bills running LLM services. That seems a little underhanded to just bake into things without…
Why assume? it should be observable. You can check the code and data traffic to see how it is used.
Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it. Now we can argue whether or not it's an appropriate amount of disk space or bandwidth to use, but that's just a reasonable practic…
I have a 2GB mobile data plan. If I was using Chrome, then some site triggers the Prompt API, that will cause Chrome to not only wipe out my data plan, but need 2 of my data plans. I don't find this reasonable.
This is exactly a consent problem, because I'm not denying it might be a useful feature, but it should be at the user's own informed choice. The fact that Chrome developers don't appear to see this might be due to them living in a bubble where they've never had to think about the costs.