Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

nicce•about 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.

thunderbong•about 2 hours ago

From 5 days ago, 1138 comments

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

Holacc•about 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•about 2 hours 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•about 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•5 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•about 1 hour ago

Email me your bank details and I’ll send the money

shevy-java•about 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.

Weryj•about 2 hours ago

And Claude is hogging 12G for Cowork which I don’t want.

sethops1•about 1 hour ago

This is what finally pushed me into using Brave.

seam_carver•about 1 hour ago

I recently switched to Safari, I'm actually very impressed by how well it works.

iamkrazy•about 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•about 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•about 3 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•about 3 hours ago

Did anyone extract these weights so we can run Gemini Nano locally? Is it better than Gemma 4?

superkuh•about 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•31 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•about 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•about 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•about 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•about 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.

goalieca•about 3 hours ago

Ironically, the AI datacenter boom is also buying up all the storage.

add-sub-mul-div•about 3 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•about 1 hour ago

“Still using” the most popular browser in the market by an absolutely huge margin? Yeah, there are a few.

Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

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Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews