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()
When Chrome 148 releases tomorrow, this will be the default behaviour on desktop.
To download, it should check for 22 GiB free disk space on the volume where your Chrome data dir is, and at least double the model size of free space in your tmp dir.
That said, you might be surprised to learn that some of the models from 3b-9b could probably replace 80% of the things nonvibe coders use chatgpt for.
Its a good idea to run small models locally if your computer can host them for privacy and cash saving reasons. But how can you trust Google to autoinstall one on your machine in 2026? I just couldn't do it.
Not on my devices. Auto update has been abused so often now that it is an embarrassment to the industry. Auto update should be for bug fixes and security issues only.
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.
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 disagree about the utility of calling out specific things out of proportion to their place in the climate crisis. Tackle AI, yes, and fast fashion and cars, and ... that one change to Chrome? I guess if that's where you want to put your energy, Sisyphus.
I definitely trust Google's team (and large trillion dollar companies with sufficient resources to do this) to make reasonable choices for their users... said, perhaps, someone ever? Certainly not me.
(I wanted to write something far snarkier and sarcastic but getting annoyed at google is like getting annoyed at a lawnmower/Oracle. That plus HN guidelines.)
I never intentionally used any AI features in Chrome but first was made aware of the models when my disk was running out of space. I investigated with a disk usage tool and found I had multiple versions of the model in my Chrome directory taking up ~12gb. This was about half a year ago and maybe I was in a bad experiment or something but it's definitely not opt in or user visible. Less tech savvy people will have a really hard time understanding why their disk space is running low.
> You only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.
i certainly never activated it willfully. i use Chrome only as a fallback testing platform for web dev - a handful of times per month - yet both Chrome Stable and Chrome Unstable had installed this 4GB monstrosity in my home dir. 8GB of junk i'd never used. Both have since been uninstalled and replaced with Chromium.
Do you think this will not be part of some google product? On top of their normal agenda, this seems perfectly suited for them to push their AI models. So if you use anything from Google via Chrome, I would expect that this will end up on your device sooner or later.
If you google OptGuideOnDeviceModel, there’s already a lot of results of people asking what it is an how they can delete them. It’s not some kind of obscure niche feature.
I wonder when the first crypto miner-like malware appears that offloads model usage to the client computers.
I suspect it's not that simple. Last week I noticed I already had it downloaded on one of my devices, even though I'm sure the number of websites already using this API is miniscule.
The same old individualistic fallacy [1] of highlighting individual effects to hide global effects, all while compromising user privacy. In reality this will be continuous million of devices downloading these useless weight files.
[1] Used since forever by the Tobacco & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.
For one, not everyone in this world lives on high bandwidth unmetered connections. In Germany, you got a lot of people still running on 16 MBit/s ADSL, that's half an hour worth of full load just for AI garbage. With the average 50 MBit/s, it's still 10 minutes. For those running on hotspots - be it their phone with often enough 10 GB or less on your average data plan or train hotspots that cut you off after 200MB - the situation is similarly dire.
The other thing is storage. I got a nominally 256GB MacBook Air. Of these 256 GB, easily 50GB are already gone for macOS itself, swap, Recovery and everything that macOS doesn't store as part of the immutable partition (such as, you guessed it, its own AI models). Taking up 2% of the disk space without consent is definitely Not Cool.
Another angle is the processing cost, I assume Google is seeking to offload the computation for whatever features this covers from their own data centers to end users. On the scale of billions that's probably measurable and from google's side worth doing whether the users is paying for the service or not, and each of them will have more power usage with some reduced battery life on portable devices. At that scale I'd also wonder about efficiency based on what proportion of end users are using AI or running it on CPU/GPU/NPU.
So typical. Just imagining the consequences for someone with chronically low disk space, like me. Luckily I'm a Firefox person, though I use Vivaldi now and then.
The more time goes on the more I feel like I live on a different planet. Even things like "shouldn't you be able to decide what software you run on the stuff you own?" gets blank stares.
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 little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
What browsers would you recommend? I use Brave but it's still Chromium under the hood. It's the only one that I never had trouble with adblock though. Also lets me play youtube on mobile when my screen is locked.
In iOS kinda yes; you have to request desktop version, and once you activate the lock screen for the first time you have to press “play”. Then it just plays and auto plays in the background.
Don’t know about android, but there is also an extension there that blocks the visibility page api for YouTube.
Thats good to know, but I am a "out of the box" person. I never want to have to manually install extensions as thats just more stuff to remember when setting up a new machine. Yea thats a me problem, but still.
It used to support it out-of-the-box as well, but it's technically against YouTube's ToS to allow this without paying for a premium, so now you need this as an extra hoop.
I used ublock origin for a while, but I kept having issues with it on Youtube due to Youtubes anti adblock measurements. Brave for some reason always had a fix for it pretty quickly, so I never experienced these issues with it. Maybe I could try a different browser again on my next machine.
I will never use Brave after the debacle where they injected content into sites downloaded over HTTPS to pretend people were promoting their crypto token and adding a "donate" button on the page.
It helps if you're doing mundane things and want to help people who need to mix their sensitive traffic with it.
More people "legitimately" using Tor makes it less likely to have its exit nodes outright blocked, as well, and assuming all traffic from them is malicious.
You could use Chromium just for Google Meet. That's what I do. I have Chromium relatively up to date that I basically solely use when I need to. It can be Google Meet, or Teams, or whatever was purposely botched in order NOT to work with Firefox, basically sabotage, but it can also be very rare cases like Lego Spike or GrapheneOS Web installer which require WebUSB.
99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.
What mess? I only ever used Chrome as my main browser for a short while when Firefox had become rather bloaty and had slow JS, and Chrome was small and nimble. But that was something like fifteen years ago. Firefox works, is plenty fast these days, and only eats most of my RAM compared to Chrome which takes all of it, and serves me a web devoid of almost all ads and most trackers.
This isn't particularly relevant to whether you should use it right now though. If there's a restaurant I like but it might go out of business in a year I don't stop eating there today.
Firefox has a complete UBo unlike the Chrom* corporateware turd which is just Microsoft 2.0 from Google. Chrome instead of IE, and propietary JS code for Google services such as Youtube -deliberately made slower in Firefox- as the new Active X shoved down your throat in order to keep a monopoly.
With Librewolf I can get proper WebGL, full UBo -with the AI blocklist too to avoid all the slop- and Bypass Paywall Clean from Giflic or whatever was called. Yeah, eh, y local newspaper won't mainly get adverts' money but the rest of local company ads show up well even with UBo/BPC, so they get some money after all.
On RAM usage, Librewolf it's far lighter on the long term and it doesn't ping back as Firefox, and many times less than Chrom* based browsers where, I repeat, Chrome based browsers don't allow UBo any more even if installed from their Github repo enforcing some about:flags variables related to legacy extension support.
The web today without UBo it's unmanageable. Popus, more than the ones from 2003, malware disguised as ads even on mainstream, safe sites, and all of these running zillions of cookies and trackers converting your -otherwise perfectly usable- old amd64 Celeron machine with 2GB of RAM into some crawling Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. With LibreWolf and UBo I could even test Yandex Maps with Prypiat and the like and InstantStreetView too. No slowdowns, no OpenGL >= 3.3/Vulkan video card required, and no need to own a 8GB machine.
HN developers there without UBo if they depend on the web for documentation they are bit screwed if they use Chrom* based browsers, sorry. Half of the resources for their machines coudn't be used, you know for IDE's, compilers, virtual machines/containers and whatnot.
And, yes, I know about ZRAM under GNU/Linux, and just imagine how many tasks would anyone accomplish with a ZRAM compressed chunk (~1/3 of the physical RAM), a light desktop environment as Lumina/LXQT and a non-Chrom* browser blocking all pests. Up to 3X more tasks in the same machine. No need to waste money on upgrades, and compilng cycles are cut down for the good.
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.
I don't understand this perspective. How can one accept the objectively more user hostile option because the less hostile one gets money from the other. If one objects to using products funded by google, why is there not also an objection to using products from 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.
In the short term, Helium (if, like me, you can’t live without Chrome’s bookmarks). In the medium term, perhaps Ladybird. In the long term, we’re all dead.
I think they were looking for browsers that aren't based on Chromium or Gecko, which, for something still regularly updated and works with most websites, I think webkit is the only real alternative.
One upside to this is that it doesn't use Gemma and instead uses Gemini. So at least for Gemini Nano (apparently called XS internally by Google) it means that the weights are now de facto open and you no longer need a current Android phone to get the latest and best model in this class. This also makes it the only open American frontier-level model right now.
Sources for what? The pareto frontier of LLMs? How Google is pretty much on the line with most of their LLM products? Or this particular model? For the first two you need to look for size/cost vs. accuracy charts. There are tons of them floating around. For the latter there is not much official info except what you can infer by analyzing the weights.bin file that Chrome downloads. But it does mention Gemini in there, so it seems pretty obvious that it is from their proprietary line of models.
All Gemini models sit around the frontier, especially if you go to smaller sizes. Google is actually more invested into efficiency than size unlike some of the other big providers.
Sources for your claim that the model being downloaded to Android/Chrome is Gemini instead of Gemma. Other than downloading the bin file myself and analyzing it lol.
Maybe consent is not an appropriate term. Perhaps an acknowledgement and a way to say "I don't want this" would be a more suitable approach. I feel like a flag to turn off LLMs is useful. Firefox added something like this in a recent release. I don't know how much they're downloading or how much they run it, nor would I be a good judge if it's necessary or not, but I don't want that functionality in my browser so turned it off.
the subject has been faced many years ago an super well applied in EU privacy regulations: Google knows it very well, and in super details and I have no doubt they will be fined for this despite all reduction of it thanks to their lobbying (and corruptions, too, in my super personal opinion): this fact well explain EU fines based on company's income.
Exactly, for all the hate of Windows, I could at least just look for shit named co-pilot and uninstall it for a pretty nice experience on my new computer. Phones aren't always as straightforward (especially jarring as "Google services" are required in Sweden on Android for stuff like mobile identity systems).
This is so absurd... I have to keep an old (rooted in order to hide that adb is enabled) phone connected to my home server just to use such app, because grapheneos without google services is apparently not secure enough.
Oh and why is it there? Do you really think it's not loaded and executed automatically by default, so some Google executive can justify their "AI" spend?
I was working on on-device AI for 3 years. This was the prime idea we were exploring, how can someone undercut the OS providers and ship an LLM that other apps can also use on-device.
Like if meta decides to do this, it can serve an API to all mobile app companies for an on-device LLM long before the OS is there.
This is Google's way of reaching LLM distribution on laptops, since they don't have their own
On 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 really what's going on. It theory Chrome gives you a local LLM that can provide local AI powered features. In practice, everything gets sent to the cloud anyway so the local LLM seems mostly to exist as a disguise for that, which is shady AF.
As others have pointed out, the solution is https://www.firefox.com/. And whilst it's been trendy on HN for several years to slag off Firefox and Mozilla, I went back to Firefox as my daily driver several years ago, and Chrome's high-handed enforcement of Manifest V3 extensions (meaning no full fat uBlock Origin) has only served to cement that decision.
It's mostly been great. The only downside is that some sites don't work properly on Firefox, and I'm 99.999% sure that's not Firefox's fault.
For example, Paypal's post-login verification step breaks so every time I want to buy something using Paypal I have to switch to Chrome. And, no, disabling uBlock Origin and other extensions on Paypal doesn't help - I've done this already. Seriously, Paypal, it's been months: will you please just fix signing in and paying on Firefox, please?
And many sites will assume you're a bot first and ask questions later if you hit them with anything other than Chrome or Safari... which is also extremely lame and scummy.
Javascript running on a page can use a feature that requires a model to be downloaded.
I have pages that use it, or other LLM models via LiteRT or HuggingFace transformers.js.
I try to warn the user, but that is my responsibility as a page author. I like that this is enabling the web platform to remain competitive.
The author is pulling a long bow by trying to claim this is some GDPR violation. Have they ever used the web? There are inefficient sites everywhere, with autoplaying video etc.
4GB isn't nothing, but if a page wants to use it then hopefully it is useful to the user!
> At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push.
Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.
> For users on capped mobile data plans, particularly in regions where smartphone-as-only-internet is dominant (much of Africa, much of South and Southeast Asia, most of Latin America), 4 GB of unrequested download is on the order of a month's data allowance, vapourised by Chrome on the user's behalf. Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered.
THIS is a valid concern. Otherwise I'm not buying into "ask for consent because of dependency X". Users don't like questions/consents.
However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.
Some parts of the anti-AI movement are becoming so unhinged that now any use of compute is considered an environmental threat. This degrowth mentality needs to die.
No need for unlimited growth, just normal sustainable progress like the one that allows you and me to communicate here after centuries of technological progress.
The "normal sustainable progress" has already pushed us to the brink of extinction. AI is rapidly accelerating our resource use, with nothing good to show for it.
How exactly are we "on the brink of extinction"? ("We" as in humans; many other species are obviously not as lucky.)
We are probably on the brink of very bad consequences for a signification fraction of all humans (up to and including all of them, to some extent), which is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.
But what do you gain by incorrectly labeling that as "extinction"? Because you do definitely lose credibility for it, similarly to everybody using hyperbolic language such as "boiling the oceans" etc.
This is literally why the EU mandates appliance energy efficiency.
It's never a binary thing. "Is using energy good or bad?" is a stupid question which can only provide stupid answers. It has to be placed in the context of whether it's proportionate to benefit.
Things which burn a lot of energy for little benefit - and in the case of AI, often negative benefit - end up more towards the "bad".
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
What you're proposing is nothing short of a death cult. It's either degrowth or we all die, sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.
Why do you attribute to capitalism an issue that is much more fundamental than it? People want more stuff and better lives, it's as simple as that. Even hunger/gatherer societies brought themselves to extinction multiple times in the past, and I doubt the USSR would have fared better against climate change.
Technological progress is also societal progress. If we embraced degrowth in the 1800's (there was a ton of pollution back then, and a Malthusian belief in disaster!) we might not see slavery being abolished or women being able to vote.
Because capitalism ties together better lives an ideological belief in unbounded growth.
Will people's lives really be better once they're drowning or choking on wildfire smoke? But hey, at least they had cheap junk!
It's possible to have better lives as well as societal progress without endless growth. Technological progress, too, doesn't have to mean burning our oceans. We just gotta actually think about the costs and consequences of our actions.
Not every technological development is inherently good. Sometimes the cost is not worth the result. I posit the cost of AI so far has been astronomical, higher than anything else in living memory. The results on the other hand have been rather middling.
This is my issue. A cost/benefit analysis, not a strict no to progress.
Have you ever made a decision to NOT download something, turn on your computer, experiment, etc based on your perceived impact on the planet?
I mean this should (and is) be tackled at the source: 0/low emission energy generation and not consumer having to think about these decisions. Sustainable data centers using renewables etc. But not that the companies should associate/evaluate/consider bytes downloaded with environmental impact.
I know it takes extra steps to make Android perform OS or app updates over LTE. I doubt it's downloading a 4GB model over LTE unless the user has chosen to perform updates over LTE.
> However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.
Unfortunately, that automation is unreliable. It doesn't work across operating systems - Windows laptops won't enable data-saver mode when connected to iPhones and macOS laptops won't when connected to Android phones, and neither will enable it when connected to, say, public transport wifi.
And even if the OS has the information, websites can't reliably use it either. Firefox and Safari both don't implement the NetworkInformation API [1].
Why the hell can't this just be an extension in the first place? Why does it have to be bolted in by default? Why does Google and by extension its employees have this constant need to assault and violate me with this garbage?
Thanks for reminding, it was a moment of weakness. Here is the relevant quote:
> the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in <textarea>, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus
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 emissions as 50 such downloads. What’s really the point of this kind of virtue signalling?
This has to be some kind of a limited rollout, since none of my machines have this AI model installed even when Chrome is updated to the latest version. No indication that anything is being downloaded, since after updating to the latest version of Chrome on this machine, I'm seeing <100 kB/s download speeds for the entire system.
This is a bit disingenuous. If you install Chrome, you install Chrome and all it's parts. They don't ask your consent for individual parts because that would be absurd. If you don't want Chrome and all its parts, don't use it.
If I install Chrome, I expect it to take a few hundred MBs and then only take up additional space in a controlled and transparent manner - for its cache, for example. For me, secretly adding 4GB after installation is a bit too much.
If you're okay with 4GB being added, where would you draw a line? What if it downloaded a 40GB file? 400GB?
Or places with collateral damage due to failures of German ISPs and state... That is many other parts of Europe while roaming... 4GB is significant cut of the roaming data allocated...
Doing LLM locally is more climate efficient than doing in datacenters
I stopped reading here because I know this is the ramblings of a whiny person that will contribute nothing, will solve nothing and is occupying space on the internet. Whatever is the climate cost of those kbytes of the page, it seems too much for me
I use Firefox as my main browser but occasionally run into Chrome requirements for certain web apps so end up begrudgingly installing it. I'm in the habit of going straight to the chrome flags page and turning off all this junk exactly because disk usage of chrome is ridiculous otherwise.
I did the same thing, but realized I was contributing to the problem. If a web app requires Chrome for full functionality, then us switching browsers is giving them permission to continue and expand their invasive practices.
These days, I just navigate away from anything that demands I use Chrome "for best results." One of the sites for a local utility company does this, so instead I just call monthly and pay or manage my service by phone. I'm old enough to remember when that was the preferred way after mailing personal cheques went the way of the dodo, so it does not feel that inconvenient to me, but I can see where it might for other people. Still, nobody said the fight to regaining our agency online would be easy. Or convenient.
What's another 4gb of disk space when computer hardware prices are soaring into unobtanium?
I hate how much companies don't care about efficiency or their customers. It's like windows 11 requiring like 2 more GB of RAM just to see your desktop, what an upgrade, yuck.
I think the only time I've ever had to use Chrome instead of Firefox was because of some USB device thing that worked inside Chrome. Otherwise everything just works in Firefox.
The sites my colleagues and I produce. They consider Chrome === Standard and everything else a deviation for which they may begrudgingly fix obvious bugs in once pressed. It's seldom that entire sites will break in other browsers, but instead they simply do not work in some ways like modals sometimes breaking, or XHR requests failing, or performance being bad.
I am using Firefox for years now. It's such a splendid experience.
I can recommend the following extensions:
- Youtube Enhancer
- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
- Cookie Auto Decline (a MUST for Europeans)
- Slop Evader
- No Gender (a MUST for Germans)
Its a totally different browsing experience than what most people have.
I recently watched my kiddo looking something up with Edge on her laptop. I had to interfere and install Firefox. It was ridicolous!!! The amount of spam on the screen. How people can cope with this is beyond me. Especially if the solution doesn't cost anything. Just Firefox + some free extensions.
edit: because people asked about the No Gender extension:
Germany didn't have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago.
Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.
in regular German, it would translate to:
Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.
In gendered German, it became:
Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.
Youtube is virtually unwatchable without it. I honestly have no idea how most people cope. Truth is, even with an adblocker there's so much rubbish on the page that gets in my way. Invidous is much better but it's too unreliable.
Sites that autoplay a video, which follows you as you scroll are the worst.
I like the Unhooked extension. You can select which parts of YouTube you want to remove (e. g. Shorts). My start page is empty, I need to visit the channel pages to watch their videos.
It seems like you would lose meaning by automatically replacing words, no? Why would you want to censor your internet experience, just because you find someone else's use of language awkward?
It's still the same word, just as generic masculine. Gender speech isn't part of the German language but an add-on with no standardization (that's why there are multiple different approaches). Apart from looking awkward one of the main criticisms is that it hurts the reading flow. Following that point the extension improves the reading experience.
To prevent accusations of "masculinism" or sexism and to have a stronger case on having the goal to improve readability the add-on could include an option (or even make it default) to replace by generic feminine instead.
The times where you have to try to appease small but vocal perpetually outraged groups are over. The German language has no generic feminine so adding it to the extension would contradict its goal.
Forgive my ignorance, but it seems that there is more information in the "explicitly inclusive" form than the "implicitly inclusive" one. Doesn't the existence of the inclusive form allow you to explicitly use a non-inclusive form? So in this case
Lehrer being explicitly male
and Lehrer:innen being explicitly inclusive?
I appreciate that this seems to be an emotional topic, but if people choose to use language in a new way, would it not be best to not withhold that information from you as a reader? Someone else wrote that it's like using an ad-blocker, but if I were to read an article, I would want to read it in the exact form someone wrote it, no? It's a bit like Americans auto-replacing "fucking" with "f***g" in their browsers to avoid an annoyance, but they lose information in the process.
When was it introduced and why? It seems in the opposite direction of travel from many languages, which have been trying to make more gender neutral options available.
(exception: Chinese didn't really bother with gendered pronouns until about the nineteenth century, due to the need to translate European languages, so some had to be introduced)
People use the extension for the same reason people use other content blockers against advertisement, notices banners, social media widgets and so on, namely not to suffer avoidable annoyances.
> you would lose meaning
No meaning is lost that has not been there before.
> someone else's use of language awkward
Most would judge that it's not just awkward, but grating.
I'd like to know too. I struggled to understand the description of the extension - is it an anti-woke thing, or some sort of modern approach to German removing the traditional (i.e. non-political) genderisation of some words, or both, or something else?
Possible forms of inclusive speech: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen
This extension removes these possible forms of inclusive speech. Arguably they hurt the reading flow and the German language has the generic masculine. However, proponents of inclusive speech feel that the generic masculine isn't inclusive.
A bit of both? Imagine every time you read the word "actor", it is instead spelled something like "actor:ress", or "actor_ress", or "actor*ress" (because the separator hasn't been standardised).
Personally I'm in favour of it, but I will concede that if it's done enough times throughout the text (as German has way more gendered nouns in common use than English) it does come with the downside of breaking the reading flow.
The first. In German, many words that refer to a person (e.g. Fahrer/Fahrerin, male/female driver) have a plural which is identical to the male singular. For a while now, many writers have used a typographic style to make the plural gender-neutral by writing the male plural, an asterisk, and then the female plural suffix (e.g. Fahrer*innen).
Firefox added split view where you can look at two (or more) webpages side by side. This is a lifesaver when you have to fill up a form looking up stuff from another page!
Isn’t this kind of the job of the OS windowing system? It’s maybe slightly nicer to share the window chrome for two tabs but it’s not like looking at two browser tabs in parallel was impossible before.
Yes, and both Windows and MacOS have features to put things side by side... but they're not very intuitive and may require multiple inputs to achieve what the browser(s) do with one or two presses. On MacOS you have to long-press the "maximize" button, for example. I forgot that was a thing before reading this actually, but then I use the third-party tool Rectangle for window management.
Sure, but this is a lot nicer because when they are separate windows, and you have more windows, and if you have to alt-tab to check something else, it is a bit flow-breaking to bring these exact two windows back on top.
You don't have to have the sidebar chatbot thing. When mozilla added these AI features, after the update the browser prompted me to whether I want it or not, with the "yes" and "no" being equally easy to select. It did not add them without consent. You can disable all AI features altogether, or you can completely remove chatbot sidebar specifically (with 2 clicks) and have the rest of the features if you want them.
Gosh most of the time when I read people complain about firefox, it gives me the impression they have not even used firefox.
This is article about Chrome doing something undesirable with AI. Which can be easily disabled by going into chrome://flags.
And suggestion is to download Firefox which is also doing something undesirable with AI. Which is also can be easily disabled.
Seems both browsers are quite similar in this regard, so suggestion to replace one with another is not very helpful?
That's really a bullshit argument. First off, there are plenty of technical solutions that allow minors (15-17 years old) to bypass the restrictions: using sites that don't follow the law, using Tor, etc. But furthermore, these measures to restrict access to porn are counterproductive for sex workers, because it makes their situation more precarious, and they only exist to weaponize the "think of the children" narrative in order to push draconian laws and social control. Soon it will be social media's turn, and then the entire internet asking for an ID. This isn't just an empty "slippery slope" argument, it's exactly what regulators are currently doing in all Western countries.
Oh is this the browser by that company that are funded half a billion dollars a year by Google and want to become an advertising company[1] and wants their browser to become a modern AI browser[2]?
... that recently added a setting which allows you to entirely disable any AI enhancements? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-ai-controls#w_b... I mean Mozilla / Firefox aren't perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than Chrome and this comment does feel a bit like the perfect being the enemy of the good.
> Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox/Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android.
> The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
That's fair and true. I guess my issue with Firefox is that Google is obviously Google, and you know what to expect from a company like that. Mozilla is pretending to be an underdog while at the same time they are Google by proxy - aiming to bring more telemetry, more advertising, more AI and doing it with Google's money which they take partly so that Google can say they aren't a monopoly.
It's the sneaky ways that Firefox are Google that bother me. Above you said that they recently added a switch to disable AI - only after backlash (though I have to admit that the original blog post said there should be an option to disable it). I also dislike that they are focusing on AI and advertising instead of improving their browser, but that's their decision.
Graphene user here: Firefox is my standard browser because I like it but mostly because it runs ublock Origin (which again causes me to like it). Vanadium I use for social media sites so I'm not logged in to those on the primary browser.
If you're using a computer from any time in the past 20 years or so it's probably capable of multitasking so you can open another browser to pay your bills in the meantime.
I'll give myself as an example, between writing that first comment and replying to you, I downloaded and built ladybird on MacOS - it took 25 minutes, most of which was me fixing build dependencies - and here I am replying to you from an alternative browser. Text navigation is a little weird and text boxes are weird, but so far it works.
Of course, if building in the background is more effort than you're willing/able to expend, then continue using Chrome or Firefox until others finish the alternative, and then decide if the time required to download, install and get used to a packaged browser is also going to be a hindrance to you paying your bills.
There are Firefox forks that don't have any AI/advertising/etc. stuff in it.
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.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api
When Chrome 148 releases tomorrow, this will be the default behaviour on desktop.
To download, it should check for 22 GiB free disk space on the volume where your Chrome data dir is, and at least double the model size of free space in your tmp dir.
That said, you might be surprised to learn that some of the models from 3b-9b could probably replace 80% of the things nonvibe coders use chatgpt for.
Its a good idea to run small models locally if your computer can host them for privacy and cash saving reasons. But how can you trust Google to autoinstall one on your machine in 2026? I just couldn't do it.
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.
One option I'm leaving as default is "Use LiteRT-LM runtime for on-device model service inference." Any comment on that?
That other flag is for using a different open-source inference engine to the (from what I can tell) closed-source one that's used by default.
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 disagree about the utility of calling out specific things out of proportion to their place in the climate crisis. Tackle AI, yes, and fast fashion and cars, and ... that one change to Chrome? I guess if that's where you want to put your energy, Sisyphus.
Not everyone has access to the same infrastructure you have.
(I wanted to write something far snarkier and sarcastic but getting annoyed at google is like getting annoyed at a lawnmower/Oracle. That plus HN guidelines.)
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.
i certainly never activated it willfully. i use Chrome only as a fallback testing platform for web dev - a handful of times per month - yet both Chrome Stable and Chrome Unstable had installed this 4GB monstrosity in my home dir. 8GB of junk i'd never used. Both have since been uninstalled and replaced with Chromium.
If you google OptGuideOnDeviceModel, there’s already a lot of results of people asking what it is an how they can delete them. It’s not some kind of obscure niche feature.
I wonder when the first crypto miner-like malware appears that offloads model usage to the client computers.
Sorry folks, your low bandwidth situation is not, in fact, a climate change emergency.
[1] Used since forever by the Tobacco & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.
is about 60 gramms of co2 per user?
For one, not everyone in this world lives on high bandwidth unmetered connections. In Germany, you got a lot of people still running on 16 MBit/s ADSL, that's half an hour worth of full load just for AI garbage. With the average 50 MBit/s, it's still 10 minutes. For those running on hotspots - be it their phone with often enough 10 GB or less on your average data plan or train hotspots that cut you off after 200MB - the situation is similarly dire.
The other thing is storage. I got a nominally 256GB MacBook Air. Of these 256 GB, easily 50GB are already gone for macOS itself, swap, Recovery and everything that macOS doesn't store as part of the immutable partition (such as, you guessed it, its own AI models). Taking up 2% of the disk space without consent is definitely Not Cool.
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.
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 little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
Don’t know about android, but there is also an extension there that blocks the visibility page api for YouTube.
Well, it does require you to install an extension[0], but it can be done.
[0]: <https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play>
More people "legitimately" using Tor makes it less likely to have its exit nodes outright blocked, as well, and assuming all traffic from them is malicious.
Curious if Google plans to allow other browsers doing that too.
99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.
With Librewolf I can get proper WebGL, full UBo -with the AI blocklist too to avoid all the slop- and Bypass Paywall Clean from Giflic or whatever was called. Yeah, eh, y local newspaper won't mainly get adverts' money but the rest of local company ads show up well even with UBo/BPC, so they get some money after all.
On RAM usage, Librewolf it's far lighter on the long term and it doesn't ping back as Firefox, and many times less than Chrom* based browsers where, I repeat, Chrome based browsers don't allow UBo any more even if installed from their Github repo enforcing some about:flags variables related to legacy extension support.
The web today without UBo it's unmanageable. Popus, more than the ones from 2003, malware disguised as ads even on mainstream, safe sites, and all of these running zillions of cookies and trackers converting your -otherwise perfectly usable- old amd64 Celeron machine with 2GB of RAM into some crawling Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. With LibreWolf and UBo I could even test Yandex Maps with Prypiat and the like and InstantStreetView too. No slowdowns, no OpenGL >= 3.3/Vulkan video card required, and no need to own a 8GB machine.
HN developers there without UBo if they depend on the web for documentation they are bit screwed if they use Chrom* based browsers, sorry. Half of the resources for their machines coudn't be used, you know for IDE's, compilers, virtual machines/containers and whatnot. And, yes, I know about ZRAM under GNU/Linux, and just imagine how many tasks would anyone accomplish with a ZRAM compressed chunk (~1/3 of the physical RAM), a light desktop environment as Lumina/LXQT and a non-Chrom* browser blocking all pests. Up to 3X more tasks in the same machine. No need to waste money on upgrades, and compilng cycles are cut down for the good.
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.
Or Firefox of course.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api
Brave has always just worked for me and seems light on memory usage. Dunno why anyone would use chrome.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatp...
https://archive.ph/sM7O5 (missing images and styling, but the content all seems to be there)
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 really what's going on. It theory Chrome gives you a local LLM that can provide local AI powered features. In practice, everything gets sent to the cloud anyway so the local LLM seems mostly to exist as a disguise for that, which is shady AF.
As others have pointed out, the solution is https://www.firefox.com/. And whilst it's been trendy on HN for several years to slag off Firefox and Mozilla, I went back to Firefox as my daily driver several years ago, and Chrome's high-handed enforcement of Manifest V3 extensions (meaning no full fat uBlock Origin) has only served to cement that decision.
It's mostly been great. The only downside is that some sites don't work properly on Firefox, and I'm 99.999% sure that's not Firefox's fault.
For example, Paypal's post-login verification step breaks so every time I want to buy something using Paypal I have to switch to Chrome. And, no, disabling uBlock Origin and other extensions on Paypal doesn't help - I've done this already. Seriously, Paypal, it's been months: will you please just fix signing in and paying on Firefox, please?
And many sites will assume you're a bot first and ask questions later if you hit them with anything other than Chrome or Safari... which is also extremely lame and scummy.
Javascript running on a page can use a feature that requires a model to be downloaded.
I have pages that use it, or other LLM models via LiteRT or HuggingFace transformers.js.
I try to warn the user, but that is my responsibility as a page author. I like that this is enabling the web platform to remain competitive.
The author is pulling a long bow by trying to claim this is some GDPR violation. Have they ever used the web? There are inefficient sites everywhere, with autoplaying video etc.
4GB isn't nothing, but if a page wants to use it then hopefully it is useful to the user!
You can also ask why the US government fails to protect the users. Corporate dictatorship at its finest.
Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.
> For users on capped mobile data plans, particularly in regions where smartphone-as-only-internet is dominant (much of Africa, much of South and Southeast Asia, most of Latin America), 4 GB of unrequested download is on the order of a month's data allowance, vapourised by Chrome on the user's behalf. Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered.
THIS is a valid concern. Otherwise I'm not buying into "ask for consent because of dependency X". Users don't like questions/consents.
However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.
Why not? It's about 60 000 London - New York City flights by the way (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...). And what's the benefit again?
We are probably on the brink of very bad consequences for a signification fraction of all humans (up to and including all of them, to some extent), which is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.
But what do you gain by incorrectly labeling that as "extinction"? Because you do definitely lose credibility for it, similarly to everybody using hyperbolic language such as "boiling the oceans" etc.
Are they against washing machines too? Or are they just grandfathered in?
It's never a binary thing. "Is using energy good or bad?" is a stupid question which can only provide stupid answers. It has to be placed in the context of whether it's proportionate to benefit.
Things which burn a lot of energy for little benefit - and in the case of AI, often negative benefit - end up more towards the "bad".
The emissions per kWh of energy used in providing internet downloads probably is similar to that per kWh of energy used for washing clothes.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
What you're proposing is nothing short of a death cult. It's either degrowth or we all die, sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...
[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...?
Technological progress is also societal progress. If we embraced degrowth in the 1800's (there was a ton of pollution back then, and a Malthusian belief in disaster!) we might not see slavery being abolished or women being able to vote.
Will people's lives really be better once they're drowning or choking on wildfire smoke? But hey, at least they had cheap junk!
It's possible to have better lives as well as societal progress without endless growth. Technological progress, too, doesn't have to mean burning our oceans. We just gotta actually think about the costs and consequences of our actions.
Not every technological development is inherently good. Sometimes the cost is not worth the result. I posit the cost of AI so far has been astronomical, higher than anything else in living memory. The results on the other hand have been rather middling.
This is my issue. A cost/benefit analysis, not a strict no to progress.
I mean this should (and is) be tackled at the source: 0/low emission energy generation and not consumer having to think about these decisions. Sustainable data centers using renewables etc. But not that the companies should associate/evaluate/consider bytes downloaded with environmental impact.
Unfortunately, that automation is unreliable. It doesn't work across operating systems - Windows laptops won't enable data-saver mode when connected to iPhones and macOS laptops won't when connected to Android phones, and neither will enable it when connected to, say, public transport wifi.
And even if the OS has the information, websites can't reliably use it either. Firefox and Safari both don't implement the NetworkInformation API [1].
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...
> the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in <textarea>, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus
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 emissions as 50 such downloads. What’s really the point of this kind of virtue signalling?
If you're okay with 4GB being added, where would you draw a line? What if it downloaded a 40GB file? 400GB?
This is satire, obviously.
Yes, 4GB of unintended traffic can absolutely wreck someone's finances.
Doing LLM locally is more climate efficient than doing in datacenters
I stopped reading here because I know this is the ramblings of a whiny person that will contribute nothing, will solve nothing and is occupying space on the internet. Whatever is the climate cost of those kbytes of the page, it seems too much for me
These days, I just navigate away from anything that demands I use Chrome "for best results." One of the sites for a local utility company does this, so instead I just call monthly and pay or manage my service by phone. I'm old enough to remember when that was the preferred way after mailing personal cheques went the way of the dodo, so it does not feel that inconvenient to me, but I can see where it might for other people. Still, nobody said the fight to regaining our agency online would be easy. Or convenient.
I hate how much companies don't care about efficiency or their customers. It's like windows 11 requiring like 2 more GB of RAM just to see your desktop, what an upgrade, yuck.
I think the only time I've ever had to use Chrome instead of Firefox was because of some USB device thing that worked inside Chrome. Otherwise everything just works in Firefox.
It's frustrating.
I can recommend the following extensions:
- Youtube Enhancer
- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
- Cookie Auto Decline (a MUST for Europeans)
- Slop Evader
- No Gender (a MUST for Germans)
Its a totally different browsing experience than what most people have.
I recently watched my kiddo looking something up with Edge on her laptop. I had to interfere and install Firefox. It was ridicolous!!! The amount of spam on the screen. How people can cope with this is beyond me. Especially if the solution doesn't cost anything. Just Firefox + some free extensions.
edit: because people asked about the No Gender extension:
Germany didn't have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago.
Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.
in regular German, it would translate to:
Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.
In gendered German, it became:
Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.
For me, it ruins the reading experience.
Sites that autoplay a video, which follows you as you scroll are the worst.
Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.
it was
Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.
and it became:
Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.
It’s insane.
Lehrer being explicitly male and Lehrer:innen being explicitly inclusive?
I appreciate that this seems to be an emotional topic, but if people choose to use language in a new way, would it not be best to not withhold that information from you as a reader? Someone else wrote that it's like using an ad-blocker, but if I were to read an article, I would want to read it in the exact form someone wrote it, no? It's a bit like Americans auto-replacing "fucking" with "f***g" in their browsers to avoid an annoyance, but they lose information in the process.
(exception: Chinese didn't really bother with gendered pronouns until about the nineteenth century, due to the need to translate European languages, so some had to be introduced)
> you would lose meaning
No meaning is lost that has not been there before.
> someone else's use of language awkward
Most would judge that it's not just awkward, but grating.
In German: Leser (masculine)
Possible forms of inclusive speech: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen
This extension removes these possible forms of inclusive speech. Arguably they hurt the reading flow and the German language has the generic masculine. However, proponents of inclusive speech feel that the generic masculine isn't inclusive.
Personally I'm in favour of it, but I will concede that if it's done enough times throughout the text (as German has way more gendered nouns in common use than English) it does come with the downside of breaking the reading flow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_star
Ask any Emacs evangelist.
Gosh most of the time when I read people complain about firefox, it gives me the impression they have not even used firefox.
Chrome doesn't do that. I literally can't use Firefox anywhere I don't have a power socket.
My laptop also becomes a toaster.
[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-o... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
On GrapheneOS they recommend Vanadium - a more secure Chromium fork - and specifically recommend against Firefox, but that's on mobile.
> The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
Context is definitely interesting to have with your statement (From https://grapheneos.org/usage).
FF is largely funded by google money? Chrome _is_ google.
FF invests in AI features? Google invests even more in AI features and shoves them to you without consent (which ff asked me for after upgrades).
Maybe FF is not perfect or great or whatever by one's point of view, but it _is better_ than chrome, at least regarding these arguments.
It's the sneaky ways that Firefox are Google that bother me. Above you said that they recently added a switch to disable AI - only after backlash (though I have to admit that the original blog post said there should be an option to disable it). I also dislike that they are focusing on AI and advertising instead of improving their browser, but that's their decision.
If you can, run it, report issues and help them develop it.
I'll give myself as an example, between writing that first comment and replying to you, I downloaded and built ladybird on MacOS - it took 25 minutes, most of which was me fixing build dependencies - and here I am replying to you from an alternative browser. Text navigation is a little weird and text boxes are weird, but so far it works.
Of course, if building in the background is more effort than you're willing/able to expend, then continue using Chrome or Firefox until others finish the alternative, and then decide if the time required to download, install and get used to a packaged browser is also going to be a hindrance to you paying your bills.
Just uBlock Origin pre-installed
https://helium.computer/
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.