| ▲ | Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage(theverge.com) |
| 50 points by birdculture 3 hours ago | 24 comments |
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| ▲ | nicce 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| I am scared to even open Chrome these days. The only app that randomly chunks 70% of CPU availability with one tab. |
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| ▲ | thunderbong 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| From 5 days ago, 1138 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 |
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| ▲ | Holacc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The local model powers the features nobody uses. The cloud model powers the feature everyone sees. You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy. |
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| ▲ | gruez an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | >You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy. How's this conspiracy supposed to work? A technical audience who cares about privacy aren't going to be placated by 4GB sitting on their disk. They're going to want some sort of analysis (like http interception), or probably not use chrome in the first place. A non-technical audience isn't going to make the association between 4GB of disk usage and the privacy implications. | | |
| ▲ | chronc6393 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > They're going to want some sort of analysis And I want $1 billion dollars. Doesn’t mean someone’s going to give it to me. | | |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I am beginning to suspect Google is mass-sniffing on us here. Then it suddenly makes sense that the blob gathers everything. |
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| ▲ | sethops1 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is what finally pushed me into using Brave. |
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| ▲ | Weryj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And Claude is hogging 12G for Cowork which I don’t want. |
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| ▲ | seam_carver an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I recently switched to Safari, I'm actually very impressed by how well it works. |
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| ▲ | iamkrazy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| First IE, now Chrome. What gets into these companies heads once they get biggest market share? And the people working for these companies. How do you sleep at night bro? |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Google is abusing people here. I don't want that AI crap on my computer. This is like a trojan horse. |
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| ▲ | jmclnx 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Positive reinforcement anyone :) Anyway to me, 4G seems a bit lite for AI. I always avoided Chrome as much as possible, now I have a real reason to do so. I wonder if Chromium-based browsers is or will do the same? |
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| ▲ | zb3 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Did anyone extract these weights so we can run Gemini Nano locally? Is it better than Gemma 4? |
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| ▲ | superkuh 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 4GB should be nothing. It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data. |
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| ▲ | hnlmorg 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | This was mostly an Apple problem. 1TB SSDs were dirt cheap until the last 6 months when AI bought them all up. | |
| ▲ | kn100 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I reckon until the recent ai-gobbles-everything-up phenomena, this was mainly an Apple problem. Even fairly budget PCs come with at least 1tb of storage. Considering much beyond 2tb NAND gets scary pricing wise, I'm not that surprised we don't see much beyond that. | | |
| ▲ | superkuh 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but I don't think it was just Apple. The switch to charge trap based SSD storage set all pre-built consumer computers back a full decade in terms of storage size. We were only just getting back beyond 2010 levels when the megacorps started buying up all the flash fab capacity and now even most of the HDD plates are going to enterprise. | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | A full decade is a bit of an exaggeration. Not just in terms of storage capacity but especially when you consider than switching from HDDs to SSDs was a massive leap in performance for PCs and laptops. | | |
| ▲ | superkuh 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There's no debating the performance. Charge trap flash makes computing so much better. It's just a shame things went SSD only. It really isn't an exaggeration when it comes to actual storage space available per prebuilt. | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I don’t know what pre-builts you’ve seen, but when I bought 2 middle-range laptops 5 years ago, all the models were between 500GB to 1TB of storage. And it’s not a trap when most people aren’t going to fill 5TB of storage with their accounts spreadsheets but they are going to notice the performance difference between an SSD and a HDD. |
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| ▲ | goalieca 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ironically, the AI datacenter boom is also buying up all the storage. |
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| ▲ | add-sub-mul-div 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Annoying, but are the kind of people still using Chrome really that discerning about what's going on behind the scenes on their device? |
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| ▲ | afavour 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | “Still using” the most popular browser in the market by an absolutely huge margin? Yeah, there are a few. |
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