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Indeed, you could even do something like this: await fetch("/multi-gigabyte-download"); It even works on non-Chrome browsers.
i think the point is that one actually burns disk space, while the other is just a nuisance for people on plans with limited data
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yeah I'm lowkey pissed off people keep insulting google for giving them an offline version of coding enabled wikipedia that they get literally 0 data analytics from (just turn your wifi and ethernet off and use it offline after downloading it) what part of the 4Gb file offended people? the fact that ai runs on the edge reliably now?
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the edgy kids all hate google we get it but how the fk is a free offline ai model even a bad thing for privacy or even benefitting google in any way other than giving away privacy preserving tech for free
they obviously aren't good intentioned here, and benefit from the aggregate of data but OpenAI and Anthropic might as well be enemies of all humanity given they contribute nothing back to the knowledge that is useable offline without their exorbitant api costs
google should be better about their more evil tendencies but they now have sufficient competition that bootlicking is not an important thing to point out in the fight over open source(ish) models that allow people more freedom not less
its all moot when nobody can afford hardware in the first place that can run ai models so I guess I'm just yelling into the void here
I'm sorry but the AI model that was forced to write this article is struggling to explain why this is a problem. I get that a chrome update that suddenly balloons to 4gb+ is stupid, that's fair, but I'm not sure I understand the rest of the issues. They don't like the off-device AI features Google is forcing into everything, but they also don't like the on-device AI features since they don't do enough? Aside from tak…
The reality is that the move is great, it's a very cool and nice stuff, just that it takes bandwidth and space without letting the user know. A solution: New AI features are available for use offline, they will make you able to translate offline, get answers, summaries, etc, would you like to download / install them (~4 GB)? It is going to fix the experience in the UI. It's a significant misstep by Google in its form…
I wasn't? I hope that wasn't directed at me since we seem to kind of agree otherwise.
Unfortunately the vast majority of Chrome users wont understand that prompt. Google decided that the Chrome installer should be 4GB, that seems like a large web browser, but is it that crazy compared to anything else? Teams on my Mac is taking 1GB+ just in Applications (not to say I'm terribly happy about that). Chrome installs its own updates and has for a very long time, ensuring we dont have to support super old browser versions, I'm not sure where the line is.
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You'd think that if a technology is so good you don't need to force it on people.
It certainly shouldn't require masses of blank eyed fans all making highly emotional pleads to protect the sensitivity of their favorite logo. That's gross even by Microsoft standards.
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 - May 2026 (1143 comments)
IMO If you're into tech and still use Chrome*, that's on you. If you are not, you probably don't really care unless you need extra space on your PC. *Except in your job, since you probably obligated to use.
Switched from firefox few months ago, I don't like google, but firefox has only few percent of market share currenly, many pages simply do not work properly with it, plus it has bugs on macos (like onmousover stuff), which simply make it unusable. Safari is fine, but also many websites (which sometimes you need to use like banking or gov) are not tested on it. The overall browsers situation is less than ideal.
Using Google's websites much, are we? FF works great everywhere except there. I think the official term for the bugs on these pages is "oops"...
I use FF everywhere except on G pages, where I use Brave.
There's been a lot of new tech introduced through Chrome and eventually widely adopted and available everywhere. Without requiring user consent.
QUIC + HTTP/3, WebP, Service Workers / PWAs, WASM, WebRTC, View Transitions API
This feels like just another step of "make this new capability widely available so developers can adopt it if they want."
This one seems to be all on-device local capabilities. Not calling additional APIs or sending data off-device.
Is the argument just around "Don't use 4gb of drive space without asking me first"? What other issues does this introduce?
In their defense, it's an astonishingly good model for this size and you can use it for all sorts of cool stuff. Little demo of using this local model to inject AI into a page with a monkeyscript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPi33D8DoQ0&t=3000s
That does nothing to defend Google since the quality of the model is irrelevant to the accusation.