"Silently installs" is misleading. They are including a file in the package which is presumably related to the functionality of the software. I don't use chrome for a long list of reasons but it is not standard or expected to get consent for that.
There’s nothing stopping Google Chrome from doing something similar except, I suspect, Google knows or feels it will result in many fewer installs of its bloatware.
No, this is not true. The large requirement comes after a user wants to use the feature, not as a part of the normal upgrade. If the user never engages with the feature, it's not downloaded.
The feature that didn't say it would cost you 4Gb, right?
It's a bizarre way of living your life.
This is like saying that the part of driving where you wash dishes is why you, personally, need a dishwasher in your car. There is no feature that would fail the challenge if you can always claim that you need it to render a web page.
Local disk cache is a standard and reasonable feature expected by the vast majority of browser users. You are being obtuse.
Do you use a translation program to play browser games?
So no, I don't think it's a weird trend at all that people start describing software as "silently" doing things when trust in automatic updates of software (a thing that software silently does) has deservedly gone down the drain in the last few years.
I wanted a browser, not an LLM.
Related... to the functionality of feeding the same profit and loss account, right?
A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a web browser. It is something forced on users without their consent.
Of course that's what we get for giving the benefit of doubt to the company that insisted on learning the wrong things from the Google Buzz fiasco.
This does not happen. The model is not downloaded unless the user intentionally uses the feature that requires it. Then it's downloaded at that point.
That that feature (a) requires a local LLM, (b) will install a multi-GB download without telling the user, all happen without any explicit user consent.
Problem is, nor do half its T&Cs. What we thought was a web browser turns out to be a Google content delivery vehicle - and controlled by Google, not the target users.