14 comments

  • thunderbong 2 hours ago
    From 5 days ago, 1138 comments

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219

  • nicce 1 hour ago
    I am scared to even open Chrome these days. The only app that randomly chunks 70% of CPU availability with one tab.
  • Holacc 3 hours ago
    The local model powers the features nobody uses. The cloud model powers the feature everyone sees. You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy.
    • gruez 1 hour ago
      >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 1 hour ago
        > 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.

        • gruez 18 minutes ago
          Point is, nobody is going to be like "wow, chrome is eating up 4GB of my disk space? I totally trust it now!"
        • hnlmorg 1 hour ago
          Email me your bank details and I’ll send the money
    • shevy-java 1 hour ago
      I am beginning to suspect Google is mass-sniffing on us here. Then it suddenly makes sense that the blob gathers everything.
  • seam_carver 1 hour ago
    I recently switched to Safari, I'm actually very impressed by how well it works.
  • sethops1 1 hour ago
    This is what finally pushed me into using Brave.
  • Weryj 2 hours ago
    And Claude is hogging 12G for Cowork which I don’t want.
  • iamkrazy 2 hours ago
    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?
  • shevy-java 1 hour ago
    Google is abusing people here.

    I don't want that AI crap on my computer. This is like a trojan horse.

  • jmclnx 2 hours ago
    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?

  • zb3 3 hours ago
    Did anyone extract these weights so we can run Gemini Nano locally? Is it better than Gemma 4?
  • superkuh 3 hours ago
    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.

    • chatmasta 43 minutes ago
      It is nothing. This whole fiasco is being blown way out of proportion when there are a hundred other issues with Chrome that we could be complaining about.
    • hnlmorg 1 hour ago
      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
      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
        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 1 hour ago
          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 1 hour ago
            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 54 minutes ago
              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.

    • goalieca 3 hours ago
      Ironically, the AI datacenter boom is also buying up all the storage.
  • add-sub-mul-div 2 hours ago
    Annoying, but are the kind of people still using Chrome really that discerning about what's going on behind the scenes on their device?
    • afavour 1 hour ago
      “Still using” the most popular browser in the market by an absolutely huge margin? Yeah, there are a few.
    • llbbdd 2 hours ago
      [flagged]
  • FrozenThane269 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • SadErn 2 hours ago
    [dead]