"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.
"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.
There is, however, precedent for software alerting/asking the user to install “extras” or utility packs and showing the disk size that content will take up and even allowing the user to choose a location to store such things. Creative software does this all the time.
There’s nothing stopping Google Chrome from doing something similar except, I suspect, Google knows or feels it will result in many fewer installs of its bloatware.
That's a good point. "Downloads a 4GB LLM model without notice" would get a good amount of attention and be an accurate representation of the situation. The article undermines itself by misrepresenting the problem.
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Rage bait? It's a fact about how some software handles downloading extra content. This issue and how ads on the web are served are two separate issues.
I doubt many people here download any ads in a day.
“Silent” seems appropriate given it historically never required such a large storage requirement and the nature of the new feature seems entirely optional; and it’s happening silently as part of a normal upgrade.
> it's happening silently as part of a normal upgrade.
No, this is not true. The large requirement comes after a user wants to use the feature, not as a part of the normal upgrade. If the user never engages with the feature, it's not downloaded.
According to above, it is triggered by the website calling the feature. The user might have no idea. That's not what consent looks like
That's even more silent.
> No, this is not true. The large requirement comes after a user wants to use the feature,
The feature that didn't say it would cost you 4Gb, right?
Are you okay with a 1 GB chrome install suddenly becoming a 5 GB chrome install on all your machines, without your permission or knowledge, for functionality you may or may not want?
Yes because in their mind corporate power is the only thing that matters in our lives. Not what people want, but what Google wants is clearly the only thing that matters for them.
It's a bizarre way of living your life.
They aren’t wrong, though. There is no incentive for Google to do anything else if 75 % of web users keep using Chrome no matter what happens to it.
Isn't that what it always has done after caching a few weeks of websites?
100%. "Researchers Discover Chrome Uses Your Hard Drive to Silently Make a Copy of Everything you Look At Online" is ominous and scary and also an accurate description of how caches work. There's enough scary and bad AI stuff to discuss without needing to use scare tactics.
What part of rendering a web page needs Gemini?
What part of rendering a web page needs a local disk cache?
The part where you revisit or reload a site
Okay, then the part where I translate or extract text from an image or summarize a site is the part where I need Gemini.
Everyone revisits or reloads a website. Not everyone uses the features you refer to, and I would guess it's a minority that does.
What part of rendering a site is text extraction or summary?
Do you use a translation program to play browser games?
> the part where I need Gemini.
This is like saying that the part of driving where you wash dishes is why you, personally, need a dishwasher in your car. There is no feature that would fail the challenge if you can always claim that you need it to render a web page.
Local disk cache is a standard and reasonable feature expected by the vast majority of browser users. You are being obtuse.
Who paid you to write this
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.
Its a salesman's foot in the door, except its near-invisible and gets to walk round your house.
No weird: accurate. It IS a silent install.
I wanted a browser, not an LLM.
Completely missing the point.
https://share.google/aimode/WOJL4sf0GK2Vyi6kA
What is this link supposed to be doing? Does it need desktop Chrome to run, maybe?
If it gets the clicks it sticks.
They are installing a software package nobody expects and which isn’t need to run a browser.
Then what is your definition of "installing" exactly? Are you going to split hairs about it not being a separate program being installed and running in the background, but weights being used by code that is run inside the browser? Because honestly, I don't think there's any significant difference from the user's perspective here. Other than the fact that doing the latter bypasses the need to get permission to install a new program. Which makes it an even worse violation, in a way, since it undermines the trust that the browser as a platform is just a browser.
A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a web browser. It is something forced on users without their consent.
Of course that's what we get for giving the benefit of doubt to the company that insisted on learning the wrong things from the Google Buzz fiasco.
Install does convey something more involved than including a file, that's not splitting hairs. It is not uncommon for software to include malware that runs independently of the software you expected, and the headline is clickbait that taps into those concerns. I'm here for the concerns about bloat. "Downloads" would have been the right term to use but it doesn't sound as scary.
> A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a web browser.
Problem is, nor do half its T&Cs. What we thought was a web browser turns out to be a Google content delivery vehicle - and controlled by Google, not the target users.
> A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a web browser. It is something forced on users without their consent.
This does not happen. The model is not downloaded unless the user intentionally uses the feature that requires it. Then it's downloaded at that point.
Unless the user uses a feature.
That that feature (a) requires a local LLM, (b) will install a multi-GB download without telling the user, all happen without any explicit user consent.
untrue, I’ve deleted it many times in the last year. I don’t think this is new.
ah, yeah, first showed up in April of 2025
> "Silently installs" is misleading. They are including a file in the package which is presumably related to the functionality of the software.
Related... to the functionality of feeding the same profit and loss account, right?
"functionality of the software" has already been mentioned haha
This feels deliberately reductive