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).

That ship has sailed on the web a long time ago.

Read the article, it's not about that, but a mere 4GB of storage.

Don't install chrome in the first place then

Does that include the CPU burning cat girl captchas or not?

Hello iOS upgrade.

Isn't that asking for consent?

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.

There's a setting in `chrome://flags` mentioned in the post that allows users to turn this off. I guess people want opt-in consent rather opt-out consent which there's always debate about. Some people say it degrades the experience for the majority of users who would opt-in for the happiness of the few possibly already detracting users.

Guess what runs my PC. Tech companies just don't understand consent.

    Q: Does <company> understand consent?
    A: No / Maybe Later

    Q: Does <company> understand consent?
    A: No / Maybe Later / we did it anyway, you'll need to search to find out how to turn it off, maybe ask the new AI model we've just back-door installed?

Yes, which is why I use paid-for OSes and browsers, instead of free ones like Linux or Firefox. I don't want to be the product.

Brave origin on linux looks pretty solid now. Now I'm using that and Librewolf.

Firefox.

I still use Firefox. It does all I need with no ads. That's nice.

Currently using Helium.

Vivaldi - built in ad blocker, the creator is a nice guy, transparent business model. It might be rough around the edges, but it's much better from every alternative imho.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

Anything webkit-based and open source like Epiphany or Konqueror/Rekonq, it matches your "moneyed corp" requirement (Apple).

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.

One would imagine that the model could be shared on Android and not be part of chrome. Maybe this way it’s simpler or is compatible with regulations.

Personally I draw the line where Chrome becomes worse than alternatives, and then I switch.

Lately Firefox has been getting better, but I still prefer Chrome for almost all my needs, so I stick to it. This barely even makes a difference to me. If it was 400GB however it would make a difference to me, and I would make more of an effort to switch to something else.

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

Netflix does not store 4gb on your drive...

You only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.

More data moves in your average playstation system update than that. Steam probably transmits more in a morning than that

Wikipedia say 3.6 billion Chrome users.

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.

Or just tethering abroad with an esim data plan... Just opening chrome would deplete your quota and leave you stranded. Google you are sick!

Okay, but that's still not an environmental disaster.

It's somewhat known that Chrome isn't catering to those users. They aim to deliver feature-rich experiences rather than be the de-facto browser for resource-constrained devices.

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.

Which ullustrates that humanity has reached such numbers that the smallest collective change has an enormous impact.

Should I reminder you what unlimited growth means and how it ends up in biology? Society/technology is no exception.

If it's emissions they worry about, then it's anything emitting.

Are they against washing machines too? Or are they just grandfathered in?

Our planet is literally dying.

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...?

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...

Those flags will exist already, but will default to enabled in 148.

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.

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.

It's based on Gemma 3n, and it's not the best.

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.

It's not a very good small model to be honest.

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.

We've banned this account.

Can you explain what the "No Gender" extension is about and why it is a must?

For me the most important extension is uBlock Origin. It's worth switching to Firefox for this alone.

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!

Extensions are a vector for vulnerabilities and malware though. Its happened many times already.

- Ublock origin - decentraleyes

We Should Improve Society Somewhat

Please feel free to suggest a better alternative.

Yes, that one! It's great, I can recommend it.

... 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.

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.

Firefox lets you disable all AI features with 1 setting switch.

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 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.

Like what?

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.

Isn't waterfox owned by an ad company? Might as well be the Google of the fire fox browsers.

I have to tell you something: there is consumer demand for AI.

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.

I was not happy when they added Gemini to the top bar, in its own place that nothing else gets to use.