What fury? I see mild reactions.
Google is mask off now. It’s 100% a spyware company and jn AmeriKKKan crapitalism, caveat emptor.
the bigger problem is that not enough people care enough to stop using it.
Chrome users will do literally anything except pick an alternative browser.
Reality is that the only browsers are safari, chrome and Firefox. Anything else is using the engine of these three and heavily dependent on the creator of those 3 to ship anything. Safari is the new IE, Firefox is not without his problems. Vivaldi would protect you from this kind of AI download (maybe) but is not like it is anything else then the chrome engine with a good skin on top. And on iOS all browsers are safari with a skin on top because apple say so.
Agree. That’s fallout from web becoming soooo complex. You have webasm. WebGl. JS compilation. WebRTC. Like a hundred other techs you need.
In the old days, a small team could make its own engine. There wasnt’ so much to it. Now, only like 3 co’s in the world can. And one of the 3 is propreitary for only their own hw.
There’s Gemini ofc. But I doubt it will ever catch on outside like 0.001%.
Not that i don’t wish there were more than 3 browser engines, but in practice right now it does not matter. Chromium isn’t a bad engine, but Chrome is a bad browser because Google shoves their shit into it. The open source Chromium parts are fine.
No, open source chromium parts are not fine. You can see this with the effort from Google to limit adblocker extensions with manifest v3, now backed in chromium. In the past other browsers had to strip privacy sandbox from chromium. Google tried to put WEI directly in chromium before it was stripped in November 2023. Google has become the cancer of modern web and abuses chromium to impose control over 80% of browser market, the same way Apple does on iOS. Long gone the time when Google motto was “don’t be evil”.
What do you mean? Manifest v2 and v3 are still available in other Chromium browsers
I have been able to install ad blockers into Chromium, but I can remember if I had to change something somewhere. The point is, that it can be done… But overall I do agree that we Chromium is not fine overall. It needs to be forked to have full community control. FF has been forked a lot and I think that is the only reason we currently have functional browsers. Apparently this is a big problem, because you don’t see other much work in this area apart from servo, which would be great if it could get enough traction to be a full blown browser soon. I will switch on day 1.
Well, technically yt-dlp too but that don’t help much for actually browsing.
Yup I loves me some yt-dlp. But big tech is at war with it. They do everything possible to break it.
Sometimes it works only if you supply some token or credential. Which defeats the purpose. Other times it works monday but breaks tuesday.
Mad respect to ytdlp team for fighting this fight. But their enemy is formidable.
Chrome is an alternative browser for most people.
I know someone who insists they realy like Edge.To be fair, it’s really easy to switch to edge, you just use the browser you currently use, then after a bit you open edge and viola, all your data was transferred without your consent, including passwords, tabs, cache, everything.
(Source: happened to me 3 times)
Edge saves your passwords in plain text 😬
🤦
Wait-- for real???
Yeah
There isn’t much difference between the two honestly. If you’re on Windows, you could argue it’s better for just one company to have your data as opposed to two.
I don’t think he was referring to browsers when he said he liked edge.
LOL…
I promise you she was
I prefer Edge to Chrome, but if you want or need a Chromium based browser there are better options. I personally prefer Waterfox which is not Chromium based mostly for the shorter UI chrome which leaves more room for the content.
Yeah.
Edge still has its problems, but it’s nowhere near the hot mess it wass in 2015 when it was basically a reskinned IE. Once they switched to Chromium it was still a hot mess, butit did get polished and has all the features you’d expect of a modern browser.
That being said, Edge is the main innovator behind built-in AI chats and similar bloat, which Chrome also likes to shove down people’s throats.
And although the feature has existed as a Firefox addon for ages, I think the first browser to support tab groups and horizontal tabs was Edge.
So since both are pretty on-par feature (and bloat) wise, run the same engine and are made and maintained by billion-dollar corpos gobbling user data, both seem like two sides of the same coin.
So for ‘normies’, it pretty much boils down to which ecosystem you’re more ingrained - that will make you prefer Edge or Chrome.
Us lunatics on Linux and/or ActivityPub prefer an independent option.
Edge is tempting to try, and I specifically love its pdf markup capabilities. Much more intuitive than Firefox. But I don’t trust Microsoft with my browsing data
One thing, Edge wasn’t reskinned Internet Explorer. It had a new compliant engine called EdgeHTML and not Trident.
I use Waterfox also
Why did they use a screenshot of Chrome from, like, Win XP times?
that’s the last time anyone chose to use it instead of treating it as some form of hegemonic default
Chrome users are likely not readers of privacy blogs. So ‘fury’ sounds like a strong word considering those same users are blissfully unawares and there is no comment in the article from google or their intention to respond to the reported abuse
Clickbait headline.
"fury and “sneakily” are loaded terms. You can find a furious person on any topic on social media and “sneakily” is nonsense, they were trying to delete a file that Chrome requires and so Chrome fixes the install when it runs.
They even note that you can disable it in settings, though not without making it sound like an unusually hard thing to do: “manually digging through setting”
Clickbait headline, ragebait article. Anything for some advertising dollars.
I agree it’s a hyperbolic headline and article; more of an opinion piece than news. It’s subjective but I think I would describe it as “sneaky” to add a 4gb AI component to a browser. The AI features were added as a default feature, opt-outs were only added later, and the users are not asked for permission before the download of the 4gb file to support the AI service. This doesn’t benefit users; it benefits Google in it’s quest to try to dominate the AI space by pushing it’s own AI features and integrations.
Just to be clear from the start, I don’t use Chrome (or any Google products or services) and recommend everyone switch to Firefox/Firefox forks which are more privacy friendly.
I completely agree that it should be opt-in as well.
It’s subjective but I think I would describe it as “sneaky” to add a 4gb AI component to a browser.
Google CONSTANTLY adds and removes default features from Chrome without any user notice (outside of patch notes) and many without the ability to opt out (Manifest v3, for example). Most people simply don’t care to pay attention to the patch notes, which is understandable.
But, this specific AI thing isn’t one of them.
Like you said, this is Google attempting to dominate the AI space my pushing it’s own AI features and integrations.
This means a lot of self-promotion
They have a blog post:
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/ai-mode-chrome/
An announcement video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56b9uHAcHYc
Developer documentation:
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in
A product page:
https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/
(There’s also YT advertisements and text ads, which I’ve seen on work PCs but I have them blocked at home so I have no links to examples)
The article, and many other articles sharing the same framing, are simply cashing in on outrage by ragebaiting the anti-AI crowd. Google has been loudly promoting their AI services and integration in all of their products. It is not at all surprising that Chrome is included in that and Google has made every attempt to tell every person on Earth that this is the case.
Hanff discovered a four-gigabyte file named “weights.bin,” in a directory called “OptGuideOnDeviceModel.” The file contains weights — the learned numerical parameters of an AI model that teach it how to weigh the importance of various data points — of Google’s Gemini Nano, which is designed to live on users’ devices, not the cloud.
“Chrome did not ask,” Hanff wrote. “Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.”
Blatantly illegal, everyone shrugs.
