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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.
People will enjoy whatever they are told to
Its not that they do not care they just are not informed in way where they will find out about it, and then care. They need to feel the personal impact it will have on them or at least understand that.
Everyone reading this comment please let others know. We need another movement bringing proper awareness to this!!
They need to feel the personal impact it will have on them ...
i've become convinced that this is the only way that will galvanize any change.
Don't know what the big deal is.
There must be tens of thousands of Furries erupting every day.
Heh, take my upvote.
TL;DR:
- Chrome downloads a 4GB AI model without any user-facing option to disable this behaviour.
- Use another browser to avoid this, e.g. a Firefox employee stated that the AI kill-switch will completely stop such features in Firefox (Source: Techlore Talks). Other alternatives are Brave, Vivaldi, Waterfox and many more. Choose what fits your needs.
What fury? I see mild reactions.
The least they could've done is install one of the abliterated models, so people can see how badly Gemini censors them...
For those that'll go search that later, you're welcome.
You chose chrome. It's on you.
Brother, it was installed on my device without my consent :|
I get you
You can still just stop using it and move to Firefox at least. However I understand you might have device restrictions for installing new programs if it's not your own device.
If the AI model runs locally and doesn’t spy on you, sure. Users should be asked before such a thing is installed and many old computers will choke hard at running this shit too. Google chrome is gonna take up a lot more ram too.
Chrome users will do literally anything except pick an alternative browser.
Chrome is an alternative browser for most people.
I know someone who insists they realy like Edge.
Chrome is an alternative browser for most people.
I dunno about most. Some, sure.
Browser market share 2009-2025
That green line is Chrome.
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.
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)
My name isn't Viola
Edge saves your passwords in plain text 😬
🤦
Wait-- for real???
Yeah
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.
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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.
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
V3 yes, obviously. V3 is what caused the reduction in API that prevented proper adblocking. V3 adblocker are less capable, cannot do dynamic blocking and delegate the blocking to the browser that can impose rules.
Brave work around this by directly injecting the adblocker in the browser, bypassing extensions API entirely. Other browsers do not do that. As of today I do not know of any browser maintaining a fork of v2. When Google killed it with v3 it was gone. Which browser are you talking about?
I know Helium still supports V2 extensions including being bundled with uBlock Origin pre-installed. That and Brave are the only ones I really use or recommend so I can't account for anything else.
Both of them simply patch support back in, but they will not be able to do that once the code is actually removed from chromium upstream on later versions. They are not going to maintain it. Helium will take Brave route and integrate the Adblock (probably brave one that is open source). But this is irrelevant, at the end of the day the main topic is the fact that google decided v2 had to go, and other derivatives browser had to comply as they have not enough resources to maintain a full fork of chromium.
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.
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%.
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.
If yt-dlp is a browser, then so is curl
Fair, I guess I was referring more to their home grown JavaScript interpreter.
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
They should be put onto privacy blogs so they understand its fucked and use way better options
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.
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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
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.
wishing it was illegal is slightly different from it actually being illegal
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this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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Privacy
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