Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
The setup that works for me is LibreWolf as primary browser and Firefox ESR if a site doesn’t work.
I don’t do web development or anything, but I haven’t run into anything that hasn’t worked recently. Librewolf works for almost everything, but if some stupid login page doesn’t like some privacy thing that librewolf is doing, I’ll try one more time with some more loose permissions, then it’s over to normal firefox.
Alarming, but not surprising.
The setup that works for me is LibreWolf as primary browser and Firefox ESR if a site doesn’t work.
I don’t do web development or anything, but I haven’t run into anything that hasn’t worked recently. Librewolf works for almost everything, but if some stupid login page doesn’t like some privacy thing that librewolf is doing, I’ll try one more time with some more loose permissions, then it’s over to normal firefox.