[davb]

An extra 4GB per user on our NFS home file server is going to be a huge pain (several thousand students). And for our Windows lab machines, they end up in AppData\Local (which isn’t redirected for operational reasons) so we either leave the profiles in place and let them accumulate (suboptimal) or clear out the profiles as we normally do and let it redownload, over and over again.

As much as I’m against unexpected 4GB bloat for an AI model, I’d much prefer it to install one copy, system-wide. 4GB per Windows or Linux lab machine, rather than a 4TB minimum load on our NFS server and 4GB downloads per user, per machine on our Windows labs.

[EvanAnderson]

Fellow sysadmin here. I'm glad to see somebody else thinking about the practical side of this.

Google should know better. Chrome has local administrator permissions anyway (w/ its updater) so they should have installed a single copy for the entire machine.

It's not cool to give a damn about the people who keep mundane stuff like desktop infrastructure, file servers, etc, working, I guess. The wanton disregard to even talk to a single in-the-trenches corporate sysadmin seems like malice.

[bigstrat2003]

Google has not ever cared about the real world implications of their browser decisions in the past. I can't say I'm surprised that they didn't start caring for this occasion.

[xxs]

I tend to deal with unwanted installations by creating a zero length file with the name (weights.bin) and remove all permissions from all users, taking the ownership as well. While the download and friends commence they fail to overwrite it.

The tactic used to work even as prevention to common RPC exploits (viruses/worms) on windows as well (in the early 2000s).

[alexpotato]

The zero size filed with the same name trick was the first thing I thought of as well.

[rapatel0]

Do you not have compression / deduplication on your nfs backing server ?

[userbinator]

Conspiracy theory: making the browser bigger makes it harder to run large quantities of headless versions, for all the useful (but anti-Google) things that enables. I suspect this is directly tied to the ongoing ascent of verification laws and other pieces of the drive towards authoritarian dystopia. They're basically DDoS'ing providers of browser-VM services with this.

[qudiqudi]

Why not force a light-weight browser and prohibit Chrome?

[EvanAnderson]

That would create vastly more support issues. You don't get to choose the software your users need.

[davb]

Indeed. We look after a huge, very diverse set of users (university science faculty - many thousands in our faculty, but tens of thousands across all faculties and professional services teams). According to https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share Chrome has over 65% market share for desktops - not supporting Chrome would be overly restrictive.

Our users interact with a huge array of internal and external sites and web apps, virtually all of which will be tested on Chrome. Our LMS, collaboration tools, internal apps, SIEM tooling, HR systems, ERP, knowledge exchange partner portals - it's all been tested on, and works with, Chrome. And we're not in a position to force thousands of vendors to make sure their applications are standards compliant and work in less popular browsers (as much as we might like to). Not to mention the deluge of tickets we'd be dealing with when incompatibilities arise; banning Chrome would cripple us.

Google have backed us into a corner with this one by making a careless default choice that takes advantage of their market dominance and forces us to work around their decision.

[niutech]

But Edge, Brave or Vivaldi are based on the same Chromium engine as Chrome.

[EvanAnderson]

I have had vendors refuse trouble reports from Edge because they only "support" Chrome. It's ridiculous but completely unsurprising to me.

[account42]

Except IT does that all the time in most companies. You don't get to choose your own OS. You have to use Outlook and Teams in most windows shops. Good luck getting approval for an Office alternative.

[EvanAnderson]

I wrote a fairly opinionated screed here but opted to delete it after I thought about it. I think I can summarize pretty succinctly: The business guides IT. Often cost reduction is the order of the day and, to that end, monocultures usually win out.

[estimator7292]

Because due to Google having a near-monopoly on the entire goddamn Internet, a shocking number of websites and services will refuse to work with non-chrome browsers.

[breakingcups]

Apart from two exceptions about 5 years ago, I've yet to encounter any of these sites in practice in Firefox.

[aidenn0]

And even when they work with non-chrome browsers if you run into an issue, you won't be able to get it escalated without trying with chrome (or lying and saying you did, I suppose).

[niutech]

E.g. Vivaldi is Chromium-based but doesn't include Nano Banana.