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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The local model powers the features nobody uses. The cloud model powers the feature everyone sees. You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy.
>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.
From 5 days ago, 1138 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219
And Claude is hogging 12G for Cowork which I don’t want.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ironically, the AI datacenter boom is also buying up all the storage.
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?
Did anyone extract these weights so we can run Gemini Nano locally? Is it better than Gemma 4?
Annoying, but are the kind of people still using Chrome really that discerning about what's going on behind the scenes on their device?
No they're too busy working to be pearl clutching about 4gb in 2026